Slashdot Mirror
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."
I am not sure that I would have liked seeing the operators expose themselves.
crim.. *cough* technically inclined people tend to use firefox and opera rather than IE.
Shocking!
I prefer Opera myself - does that now incriminate me? Or does it merely show that these criminals are security conscientious and knows that using IE on the type of websites they probably frequent would be like throwing stones at bees nests?
They did neglect to mention the most frequently used operating system. If it's equally divided between Linux, OS X and Windows it'd be hard for Internet Explorer to get beyond 33% to begin with.
This just means that malware writers understand that Internet Explorer has more vulnerabilities to exploit, so they don't use it themselves.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Actually the article says 46% Firefox and 26% Opera. Did the submitter really need to round the numbers for the article summary, when more accurate numbers would be more meaningful?
If it was really 50%/25%, I'd suspect a low sample size, i.e. 1 IE user, 2 Firefox users, and 1 Opera user.
The guy who took the phone off my lap on the train uses Firefox as well. Right?
What's next, golfers prefer cars that cost more than $100,000?
Give me a break.
What does this article even mean?
Tech savvy IT security enthusiasts prefer alternative browsers to Internet Explorer?
Criminals prefer Firefox?
Firefox users have criminal tendancies?
Firefox encourages exploitation of inferior browsers?
Or, Internet Explorer sucks.
What.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Is it the mouse-clicking or the keyboard-typing that requires more technical capability while using Firefox or Opera rather than IE?
computer people use Firefox because they know its good, others use IE because its all they know that exists
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Interestingly, Opera, which by some measures has only a 2 per cent market share, ranked second among the kit operators, with 26 per cent. "I think that's probably because operators have a familiarity with the web threat landscape," Royal told The Register, suggesting that many black-hat hackers take a security-through-obscurity approach to making sure they themselves don't get hit. "It makes them wary of using mainstream browsers."
Huh, and here I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, these hackers knew the security history of the various browsers and knew that Opera had a better security history than Internet Explorer?
One out of two criminals agree. Certifiably badass!
Life is not for the lazy.
Wow! No wonder it is so difficult to make money publishing on the Internet. Even an ad that goes away after a timeout, or can be skipped with a single click, creates angst amongst those who hold that information wants to be free. /. editors don't accept stories that include links to content behind paywalls, even if the information is really relevant to the /. community. Post a link to an article requiring registration and someone will copy the article and paste it as a comment (which seems like a pretty clear copyright violation). And now warnings are being given because someone out there is actually paying for the content that /. readers want to look at. Go ahead and mod this down troll/flamebait/overrated...but dang this obsession with not having to pay for any content, either in terms of dollars, registration, some time, or an extra mouse click, seems to be, well, obsessive!
I'm reminded of an old observation: whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks. So does eating ice cream cause sharks to attack you? No.
The observation that more Criminals prefer Firefox over IE, doesn't associate Firefox use with criminal behavior.
It most likely just means that there is a common occurence that causes technically savvy computer users to prefer Firefox.
People who build malware infrastructure are technically savvy, otherwise, they would not be able to understand and defeat technical security measures.
Non-technically savvy users often use IE because they don't understand the alternatives.
Also, they don't understand the weaknesses in IE's security defenses, the technical advantages of using Firefox (or Chrome) over IE, or the basic security principle that installing and using less-popular software (alternatives to the most popular option) means there are fewer people interested in devising a way to attack your software.
Eg Opera is not a very ripe target that hackers are highly interested in attacking, because it has so few users, it's a low value target.
Are we now to be harassed if badged-mongoloids see us on the internet and its not a blue "e" icon? /. story where one of them saw a student using a CLI
Akin to this previous
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
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.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
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?
Data collected shows that 50% of those tracked use Firefox, while 25% use Opera
Let me guess, they tracked 4 operators?
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
Which goes to show, those technically minded use Opera, which helps support my claims it is the better browser (for IT guys at least)
I.O.U One Sig.
> Unless you count copyright violation, in which case everyone is guilty.
Not true. In any case, copyright infringement is rarely a crime, at least in the USA.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A better reading could be "people that exploit vulnerabilities of browsers prefer to not use those vulnerable browsers".
In particular:
"People who create websites containing malware that takes over the browsing computer NEED to use a browser that is immune to their own takeover tools for their command-and-control console."
Jeez. Think about it a moment. How the heck are they going to work on the thing if it eats their machine when they touch it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Let's make asses of ourselves, and assume that the percentages would hold in larger samples. What would that tell us? Hmmmmmm. Maybe hackers know that FF and Opera are safer browsers than IE? Well, one has to ask, "Who would know better than a hacker?"
Alright, we've been asses long enough. Shitcan the silly assumption....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I think drawing any conclusions based 51 exploit-kit using hackers, from which only 15 IP addresses and browsers could be determined using a forged referer field, is a prime example of bogus methodology ;)
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor