Do you bother with Browser Security Updates?

The web browser seems like such an innocent piece of software that is installed on every single PC running Windows by default. However, it could be one of the most dangerous (security wise) programs that you run. The reason for this is that a large (increasing) number of virus/worm attacks are aimed towards the unsecured web browser. I am talking about Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc… To get these attacks to work, the creator of the infection installs a script on some website. When a user browses to that website that has been infected (maybe sent via a spam email or pop-up) the CSS/Java/HTML etc… script tries to take advantage of a security hole and when the script is interpreted by your browser, bang… you are infected.

The way you beat the system of viri is by keeping up to date with the latest browser security updates. Take Internet Explorer for example. IE7 (the latest version) was launched back in October 2006 and yet, only 52.5% of people using IE use the latest version. This leaves the other 47.5% at risk of being infected. Given that Microsoft Internet Explorer accounts for about 78.3% market share, that is a heck of a lot of people running the risk at being infected.

Firefox and Opera both had a good upgrade measurement with 92.2% of Firefox users having upgraded from version 1 to version 2. Just as a side note, version 3 of Firefox was not available for download at the time of the study.

This data was gathered by a collaborative study which was performed by Google, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and IBM. They used personal (anonymous) information collected from around the internet. On the big picture of things around 59% of all users were using the latest browser versions which still leaves 41% who are not secured.

So what makes 92.2% of Firefox users upgrade and only 52.5% IE users upgrade? It’s probably down to how easy and quick it is to upgrade. Firefox just prompts you to upgrade (with in versions) when you load it. This happened to me this morning and I now run the latest secure version of FF and the process took a minute or two. On the other side of the coin, if I want to upgrade Internet Explorer, I need to go to Windows Update and run through that frustrating and long process which the majority of the time, requires a reboot. Who wants to waste time doing that? I know you need to, and I personally do, but often I leave it a while till I have time to shut all my programs down and reboot.

Rather then me going through the stats and figures in detail, feel free to go visit Arstechnica for a full run down of what the study suggested.

But before you do that… are you secure and up to date with your browser updates? Maybe it’s time you did before the problems start to happen.