Mimentum Blog

Posted By Mimenta on January 19, 2010

I’m not bashing Microsoft, this is not a few techies but entire governments advising their population to use alternative Internet browsers to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

If you use Internet Explorer you run the risk of admitting a Trojan virus that can allow someone to completely take over your computer. Even setting IE to its highest security will not prevent an attack.

Warnings are being issued from governments in France, Germany, Australia and other countries are monitoring events.

What’s it all about?

Firstly – a few basics:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer, or IE as it is dubbed on the Internet, is used by 80% of the world for Internet searches.
• Most of the governments around the world use Microsoft’s operating system which requires IE to get security updates (in other words they use IE).
• To publicly decry Microsoft puts you at risk of prosecution by Microsoft, who historically, has a litigious tendency to sue and the cash flow to pay for long winded cases).

Therefore – for any government to come out publicly and announce that its people should not use IE, means they have done their homework (in case of prosecution).

In other words, there’s got to be a good reason not to use IE, so what is it?

Here we will digress a little.

Earlier in December 2009, Google in China became aware that some of its user’s accounts had been hijacked.

When it investigated the complaints, it found that these accounts were all well known human rights activists and people regarded as dissidents.

This prompted Google to check for some common means that could have infected these accounts. Further traces revealed that the Chinese ‘authorities’ (the Chinese Government refuses to admit or deny this, while applauding the action) had manipulated a newly discovered security flaw in Internet Explorer to slip a Trojan virus onto these infected computers. It’s a known fact that in China the government has thousands of people involved in hands on censorship of emails and Internet content, as well as a filter program.

This is the first proof of any government actively attacking rather than blocking content. (There is currently a diplomatic row over this but that’s another story!)

The fact is that today the security hole in IE still exists and Microsoft is claiming it is a low risk for users.

Microsoft also claim the security hole can be closed by setting IE to high security – that’s a lie.

The high security setting does not stop IE running the flawed code and therefore the vulnerability is still there.

Since the Google – Chinese Government debacle, the method used to get a Trojan virus past IE security has been published on the Internet and is readily available to those who know how to search for it (no – the link will not be published here!).

This means that invasion may have originally been a low risk, by Microsoft’s standards but now everyone can find out how to do it, it is no longer a “low risk” – it’s a very high risk.

The risk is now so high, that governments are willing to stick their neck out and advise people to use an alternative browser.

Of course some governments are sitting on the fence – it hurts to admit that the system you use is not secure and of course the US Government cannot ‘dob in’ one of their own!

What are alternative browsers?

The security hole is in the ‘engine’ of the browser. There are 4 main types of browser ‘engines’ and to avoid getting too technical, I’ll refer to them by their most common browser names (and engine – with less popular variants in brackets) –

• Internet Explorer (Trident engine)
• Mozilla Firefox (Gecko engine – flock, Sea Monkey, Camino, Netscape 9)
• Safari and Google Chrome (both use the Webkit engine – also Midori and KHTML browsers)
• Opera (presto engine – no other variants)

In terms of both security and performance I suggest Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox, in that order, regardless of your operating system because they are all cross platform.

I think you will also be pleasantly surprised at the results. They are all superior in performance to IE.

Other related articles

(French & German governments warning not to use IE)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8465038.stm

(Australian Federal Government warning not to use IE)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/high/technology/8463516.stm

(Yahoo Tech saying this flaw is not a minor flaw but a major problem)

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/111811

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