[ale] spyware and IE

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 13:51, Fulton Green wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 01:40:29PM -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Is any other browser besides IE that is susceptible to the current
> > onslaught of spyware? I have been using this as a reason to migrate
> > people away from IE. So far, none of my Mozilla/Firefox users have been
> > hit with anything (yet). I'm reasonably sure that the underlying
> > technology is sufficiently different that the spyware would need to be
> > written for the new browsers. But I'm not sure.
> > 
> > Are these new, evil things (spyware, etc) exploiting browser technology
> > or just poor security models in IE?
> 
> Is Mozilla able to install ActiveX controls under Windows, or is Moz
> still insistent on the Netscape-style plugin architecture? 

I'm not sure if Moz supports active X or not. I hope not. That seems to
be the attack vector for the spyware. I had a client whose machine
became unstable when it was invaded by multiple version of the same 5-8
spyware apps.

>  Most of the
> spyware I've seen is dependent upon a user hitting "OK" to the standard
> permission-to-install-ActiveX-control dialog.  It's the same process that
> lets a user install Sun's JRE and Macromedia's Flash stuff.

Many people I clean up after have the default stuff intact on their
security setting. That means Active-X is on with no confirmation. Yowch!
> 
> But if the spyware is riding on a non-browser platform (e.g., Kazaa or
> RealPlayer), then that's an entirely different set of issues.
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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