Over 600 million users are surfing the Web with a potentially unsafe browser, according to a Swiss study released this week. Among the least compliant were users of Internet Explorer, which currently dominates the Internet browser market. The study was conducted by ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM, examined the Google logs of users browsing the Web between January 2007 and June 2008.
A total of 52.4% of all IE users had failed to upgrade to IE7, the latest version of Microsoft’s browser, according to the survey results. Moreover, merely 47.6% of IE users had all of the software upgrades and patches installed on their browsers needed for “safe” Internet surfing. In contrast, 83.3% of Firefox users were using totally updated browsers, followed by 65.3% for Safari and 56.1% for the Opera browser.
The data was collected in mid-June 2008. The users were scattered among 78 percent Internet Explorer users, 16 percent Firefox, 3 percent Safari, and 0.8 percent for Opera. Of these, 52 percent were running the latest version of Internet Explorer, 92 percent for Firefox, 70 percent for Apple, and 90 percent for Opera.
Web browsers are often a weak link in the security chain, as software vulnerabilities can make it easy for hackers to gain control of a PC. When that happens, hackers can perform malicious acts such as stealing personal data or turning PCs into spam-spewing drones.
What the researchers found is that although software vendors provide patches for security problems, it can take days, weeks or months before people update their applications. In the meantime, those users are at risk.
Source: PC Magazine
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