Criminals Prefer Firefox, Opera Web Browsers

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."

Re:Missing the Point

[Anonymous Coward]

I like using Chrome to watch flash video and I usually use Firefox for web surfing. FF loves to hoard memory watching videos but Chrome doesn't seem to have many problems with it.

I love the comments on...

[vistapwns]

IE's lack of security being a reason for this. This is not true of recent versions of IE, and in fact, IE is sandboxed in recent versions of Windows, unlike FF and Opera. The Pwn2Own hacker winner rated it at 9/10 in security, and so on. I highly doubt this has anything to do with real security, more like hackers are faddish gullable kids who believe the "IE is teh insecure!" hype that the typical slashdotter believes. Ya mod me down, I don't care.

So what is the IE %?

[neonprimetime]

If FireFox 46, Opera 26, that is 72. does that mean IE is close to 28? or are there other browsers that take up the rest ... the story seemed to lack that info?

opera in russia

[shird]

I'm surprised Opera isn't more represented, given the number of Russian cyber-crimminals. Opera is quite widely used in Russia. Opera once did a random street sampling in the eastern bloc after Google's video of asking people "What is a browser" in New York Square (to which people replied "Google" or "Yahoo" etc). They found most people knew what it was and majority used Opera:
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/25/what-is-a-browser-russian-edition [opera.com]

Which goes to show, those technically minded use Opera, which helps support my claims it is the better browser (for IT guys at least)

Re:What do you mean?

[REggert]

Less than a minute? Wow! That's almost as fast as the four seconds it takes in my browser!

I've always been fascinated by the fact that disabling scripting in FireFox requires a plugin. In Opera, all you do is click a checkbox in a drop-down menu (or to do it per-site, a checkbox in a dialog window). The same goes for enabling/disabling plugins, applets, sound, cookies, animated images, popups (actually a set of radio buttons and not a checkbox), proxy servers, and sending referer information. It seems to me to be an excessive amount of work to have to install additional software just to get basic security features.

And yes, I'm an Opera fanboy. ;-)

I've always wondered this

[ILuvRamen]

I've always wondered if someone could make a browser just for hacking. Like display POST data in plain text and let you modify javascript commands and change true to false and send invalid form data anyway, etc. That would be so unbelievably valuable but as far as I know, it doesn't exist. Is that isn't feasible and why has nobody ever done it?! Are rendering engines and javascript engines that hard to write from scratch? Wouldn't hackers just copy and modify existing engines?