Browser Security News

They just keep appearing. If you shut one down, sometimes many replace it. It seems that the “shadier” the web site you are visiting, the more likely you are to encounter a seemingly endless cascade of pop-up web advertisements. But, even reputable sites like Weather.com and About.com use pop-up ads as a marketing tool.
For users […]

Flock is a "social browser" built on the Firefox code base, which integrates blogging, photo sharing with Flickr or Photobucket, "favorites" (a.k.a. bookmarks) using del.icio.us or Shadows, and other collaborative features. Last November I took a look at an early Flock release, and found it to be interesting, if a little bit rough. The Flock […]

Not everyone runs as many "personal" computers as I have — 24, at last count — but many of us have both a PC and a laptop. One of the big problems, whether you run two dozen or two PCs, is keeping your Web browser bookmarks and other settings straight. And, when you run more […]

Opera is gearing up for the release of Opera 9.
The new browser would presumably be released this coming Tuesday (June 20th) at a formal event Opera is holding in Seattle, WA. There has been lots of speculation about what Opera will do at this event in Seattle, but it seems clear to me that […]

If you have ever been bombarded with pop-up advertisements or discover that your homepage has been replaced (usually with a link to a pornography or shopping bargains’ Web site) when you click on your Internet browser, you have been hit by spyware.
For starters, spyware is not a virus but can be as abrasive as the […]

I woke up Saturday morning to an email from Sun’s Francois "Mr. JavaDB" Orsini that alerted me to Google Browser Sync. If you’ve caught any of my previous blogs about JavaDB, then you know that I’m pretty excited about its potential to solve the so called "offline" problem with Web based applications like the […]

For years, the Web browser was a technology that seemed frozen in time. While the Web itself exploded with new types of content and virtual communities, the way users accessed that material changed hardly at all from 1997 to 2004 (not coincidentally, the years when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had a chokehold on the browser market).
But […]

Microsoft Internet Explorer is prone to a memory-corruption vulnerability that is related to the instantiation of COM objects. This issue results from a design error. The vulnerability arises because of the way Internet Explorer tries to instantiate certain COM objects as ActiveX controls, resulting in arbitrary code execution. The affected objects are not intended to […]

Websense Security Labs has received several reports of a new worm spreading to Yahoo! web mail accounts. Yahoo! mail incorrectly filters the "onload" attribute out of <img> tags in HTML emails. The "onload" script is executed upon receipt of the malicious email. The script utilizes the Yahoo! QuickBuilder tool to mine all the email addresses […]

For many of us, "default settings" are irritations that don’t last long after we install a piece of software or unpack a new computer (although we still recommend buying and building your own). Yet many users leave their default settings just as they found them, which means that in the browser wars, there’s worry that […]