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IE More Secure Than Mozilla?
killproc writes "Symantec has issued a report that suggests that Internet Explorer may be more secure than the open source Mozilla Foundation browsers. "According to the report, 25 vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities were disclosed for the Mozilla browsers during the first half of 2005, "the most of any browser studied," the report's authors stated. Eighteen of these flaws were classified as high severity.
"During the same period, 13 vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities were disclosed for IE, eight of which were high severity," the report noted." "
How many of these vulnerabilities were discovered or aided because of the very fact that the Mozilla family of products are open source, open to the intense peer scrutiny of the community, one of the core, fundamental facets of the Mozilla products, and open source projects in general, that will help quickly make them more secure? Do they even grasp this concept?
How quickly and effectively were the Mozilla/Firefox vulnerabilities patched in comparison to IE?
Is there any consideration given to the fact that Internet Explorer is a decade old and integral to the OS, and STILL routinely has extremely critical vulnerabilities, and may have an untold number of yet-to-be-discovered critical vulnerabilities?
Assuming customer choice is important, a customer can elect to not use Firefox and remove it from their system. Can the customer remove IE? Can the customer even elect to not use IE, or does the OS still force them to use IE for some tasks?
I could go on, but I think it goes without saying that at best this "report" uses extremely flawed logic to draw its conclusions, and at worst, Symantec is shilling for Microsoft.
Or both.
I have yet to get a spyware infection from using Firefox...
Security is a process not a state.
A browser that has 5 reported vulnerabilities is not more secure than a browser that has 30. All it takes in one vulnerability to make your browser insecure
Once any vulnerability is discovered, relative security depends upon is how many users are exposed, and for how long.
Given that vulnerabilities have been found in both, security comparisons should compare the steps taken to reduce the window of vulnerability.
A simple comparison of the number of vulnerabilities does not give much indication about how long the average user was exposed. Nor does it give an indication of how many hackers are taking advantage of the vulnerability to give you a useful security indicator: "How likely is that any given user was hacked via the product".
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How many of those Mozilla exploits compromise the entire OS?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Mozilla has reacted to a Symantec report issued on Monday which said serious vulnerabilities were being found in Mozilla's browsers faster than in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The study was conducted over the first six months of 2005.1 86-39020375t-10000025c
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/print/?TYPE=story&AT=39219
Anyone who thinks Symantec isn't acting in a *VERY* self-serving manner in the past few days worth of FUD is kidding themselves.
I kid you not, Symantec has been saying "Don't use the Mac, it's insecure! Or Linux! Or Mozilla! They're not secure, oh noes!!!"
Guess why... maybe it's because they don't have products for those operating systems... or maybe it's because there are no virii in the wild, and they haven't been able to figure out how to write good enough virii for those OS' to scare people into buying their shitty product?
You decide. I already have.
...Steve
I think you may be confusing Symantec with another company . Last I heard Symantec were a menace who enjoyed spreading fear so people would buy their security products (which in a lot of cases did more harm than good) .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
What drivel.
There are several massive logical ballsups here, made by the linker and the linkee.
1) Not all exploits are created equal. Look at the number of those Moz exploits rated by Secunia as 'Extremely Severe' or 'Critical' compared to those for IE.
2) Mozilla Firefox is not bug free. No piece of software is bug free, and only a mentally retarded moron would believe otherwise. What is important is not that security flaws get found, but (a) how open the organisation is about the flaw [full disclosure] and (b) timeliness of fixes.
3) Mozilla believes in full disclosure, Microsoft does not.
4) The average time taken to patch a flaw in Firefox is two days. IE has unpatched vulnerabilities going back SIX YEARS.
5) Critical components of Firefox run in an sandboxed unprivileged space. When Firefox flaws are discovered, the damage done is minimised. IE runs everything with administrator privileges. When IE is exploited (regularly), a full-on system-rape inevitably follows.
6) ActiveX. The unsafe system by which 90% of spyware, adware, trojans, porn diallers etc. enter your system. Guess which browser has ActiveX turned on by default? Yes, IE. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX because it's just too bloody dangerous.
The security arguments being made about IE vs Firefox in that argument are unreconstructed luddite ballacks.
Although, honestly, we all know security is not the reason we geeks like Firefox. We like it because OMG 3XT3NSI0NZ!!!
So squish.
Martin
How about this: a report that identifies the vulnerabilities associated with a vendor, and not a product. In other words, after the initial public announcement of a vulnerability, we report how long it took the vendor to release a patch. Lower scores are better.
Anybody think that'll work? If not, why not?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Even symantec admits that this report is a steaming pile of crap.
From TFA:
Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Nice. So in terms of checking off the reported vulnerabilities and counting each one equally, if the report would be honest, IE would have 32 issues and Firefox would have 29. For the sake of this report, all vulnerabilities are equally bad, right? Well, not according to TFA:
Symantec admitted that "at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred," but added that it "expects this to change as alternative browsers become increasingly widely deployed."
So the IE vulnerabilities result in widespread exploitation and the Firefox ones don't, but firefox is somehow worse? I think the only way in which firefox is worse, from Symantec's perspective, is that the constantly malware-infested machines (where IE is the main infestation vector) inflate demand for the crap that Symantec peddles, and they're afraid that if people aren't constantly suffering from the pain of these infections this demand will evaporate.
Feh. Maybe I'm a cynic, but this looks like marketing poorly disguised as research to me...
.sig: file not found
Bug free software is quite possible. It's just prohibitively expensive, because it usually requires that the developers use a mathematical validation system. Thus it's typically confined to projects where system failure would result in Human casualties. It's an irrelevant quibble though, since web browsers are far, far too complex to ever be formally validated.
This exposes the gulf between open source security and proprietary security. Ignore for a minute the fact that Symantec a) has a vested interest in you using insecure products and b) uses highly flawed methodolgy as their "count" is actually "count of vendor-admitted bugs". There's a major difference between a vulnerability in Mozilla and a vulnerability in IE.
Since we don't have the source for IE, any vulnerability found is, by definition, exploitable. Someone found a way to exploit it- you get a vulnerability.
Vulnerabilities found in Mozilla, on the other hand, are often theoretical in nature. Someone looking through the source finds the problem, but no exploit is written.
Another major problem is here:
My entire system isn't going to be compromised from me browsing with Mozilla. Period. Somebody is confused.
Do you have ESP?