The Fire-Breathing Browser

By Jerry Pournelle

October 13, 2003

(The Fire-Breathing Browser :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 279

The system attacks continue. They're very dangerous, but most of them require your cooperation. Be careful out there. Things aren't what they seem. Of course you know not to open unexpected e-mail attachments, but there are other dangers, and as Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak says, there is no patch for the human brain.

The latest series looks like official notifications from eBay to the effect that unless you send a lot of information to what looks like a secure site, you'll lose your eBay accounts and all your bids and sales will be cancelled.

There are many variants of this attack, involving eBay, PayPal, and other financial services you may use. I presume BYTE readers know better than to fall for this stuff, but do warn your friends: these things can look quite official. Incidentally, in most cases the entire letter is a hyperlink that will take you to the scam Web site.

There are also new vulnerabilities. The latest of those is a hole in Internet Explorer that could allow anyone using Internet Explorer to be vulnerable. In Microsoft's own words, the "Impact of vulnerability" is to "Run code of attacker's choice"—which means anything including turning your system into a zombie that mounts attacks against other sites, or spams the White House with terrorist threats…

The good news is that this is one of those holes found and reported by Microsoft along with the fix, and I have no confirmation of any actual exploits. The bad news is that if this was found to be in the Internet Explorer code after all these security reviews, what other holes might be in there?

Mozilla

One solution suggested by many of my readers and a number of my associates is to give up Microsoft Internet Explorer and use Mozilla. This is started as an open source version of Netscape and is now maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. I am told that when they began serious work on Mozilla, they found the Netscape code was such a mess that they started over.

 Page 1 of 1