Criminals Prefer Firefox, Opera Web Browsers 172
An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers at Purewire have leveraged vulnerabilities in malware infrastructure to track the criminals behind it. In a three-month long project, they used security flaws in exploit kits to get operators to expose themselves (Obnoxious interstitial ad between link and content) when they access the kits' admin control panels. Data collected shows that 50% of those tracked use Firefox, while 25% use Opera."
Bad Numbers in Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the article says 46% Firefox and 26% Opera. Did the submitter really need to round the numbers for the article summary, when more accurate numbers would be more meaningful?
If it was really 50%/25%, I'd suspect a low sample size, i.e. 1 IE user, 2 Firefox users, and 1 Opera user.
Fireofx is that good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What do you mean? (Score:3, Informative)
It's simply being aware of alternatives. If you know what a browser is, and that you have a choice of browser, you're well ahead of the average internet user.
Re:Keep it in perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
> Unless you count copyright violation, in which case everyone is guilty.
Not true. In any case, copyright infringement is rarely a crime, at least in the USA.
Re:Does that make me a criminal? (Score:1, Informative)
When one is considering the personalities of those who use browsers; I think of the Over Dressed Smiling Show Offs convicted of Lying, Cheating, and Stealing [albion.com] are a special breed apart.
Re:What do you mean? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually you can at least when i used IE years ago, turn off the scripts. In fact, you can tell it to allow just scripts to run on certain pages but not others. On firefox? Cant do it without the plugin! Furthermore, IEs feature is a part of a security profiles feature which included a huge number of site features you could turn off, including many others like cookies. You would create a series of profiles, and then establish certain settings in that profile, then add websites to the profile. You could therefore control multiple things through the profiles. Cant do it with firefox. The noscript only covers js, so if you wanted to block cookies as well, youd have to create a completely seperate database of sites.
Re:So the story is.. (Score:3, Informative)
Probably has something to do with this?