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When Malware Authors Combine Efforts
An anonymous reader writes "Spammers, Hackers and virus writers are all teaming up according to some russian security researchers. This means that they reckon that weaknesses will be exploited in a matter of hours of being announced, rather thant the weeks and months that we're seeing now.
Scary stuff."
Nonetheless, we can do 2 things to protect ourselves. First, download and install FireFox. Use it for all secure transactions (i.e. "https") on the web. Set the security on your Internet Explorer to "HIGH", disabling Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, etc. Use Internet Explorer only for casual browsing.
On my computer, Internet Explorer is slightly faster for casual browsing than FireFox because Explorer is more tightly integrated into the operating system.
Anyhow, the second thing that you can do to protect yourself and the rest of Western society is to join the boycott of products that are "Made in China". It is having an effect on the West Coast. The boycott includes products made in Hong Kong and Taiwan province. Hurt the Chinese economy, and you will slap the Chinese to attention, forcing the brutes to fix the problem with spammers, etc.
It's the poisonous anti-MS attitude that sites like this breed that promote the onslaught of security exploits that are crippling users around the world. At some point /. users will have to realize that most users don't even know where the file menu is, so switching to Firefox is not a real easy sell to them. They take what comes with their PC, and all they know is the brand name Windows.
/. should take the responsible approach and stop proliferating the hate of MS. I'm all for reporting exploits after the fact however.
To me this is the reckless media that drew too much attention to school violence causing more to occur. The popular media learned to not play up those stories resulting in less and less over the past few years. Perhaps
In your heart of hearts, your love of products like Firefox are underdog approaches to life that seem to forget that no major innovation has occurred at the browser in years. If your best argument for Firefox is security I must remind you that all software is inherently insecure because it was created by human beings. There is nothing in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera or IE for that matter that has changed in the past 5 years that makes banking, shopping, etc. easier or more rich. The innovation stopped in 2000. All of these gimicks like running Firefox from a flash drive are just parlour tricks with no real world value to 99% of users.
die, microsoft, Die, DIE!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
No, don't tell me, let me guess: you run Windows, right?
I've heard about these virus thingies, but I've never seen any. Could you send me a few? I'm starting to feel deprived. That's what comes of not using Windows.
See what I've been reading.