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Symantec’s 6 Month Online Security Report Card
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-09-19
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Internet security powerhouse Symantec released their "Symantec Internet Security Threat Report" today covering the first 6 months of 2005. The big story in this report is that many resources and tools traditionally thought of as secure and relatively problem free are just as open for attack as traditional Microsoft-based tools.
First on the list would be browsers. While Microsoft buries open-source based Mozilla in market share, for security vulnerabilities it appears to be reversed, at least in the first half of 2005. The report said that Mozilla had 25 vulnerabilities reported during this period, 18 of which were rated high severity. This is up from 44% during the second half of 2004.
Microsoft, on the other hand, had only 13 vendor confirmed vulnerabilities, down from the 31 in the second half of 2004. 62% of those 13 were considered high. Opera had 6 new vulnerabilities down from the 11 found in the previous reported period. Safari had 2 confirmed vulnerabilities and Konqueror also had 2 (this report was the first time Symantec included Konqueror).
This is significant because it show a marked improvement in Microsoft's efforts and it also shows that as Mozilla's market share has gone up, so have the attacks. It's a direct correlation to the level of usage of the browser. It also suggest heavily that the browser isn't necessarily more safe, as long thought, than Internet Explorer by Microsoft. The big thing going in favor of Mozilla though is that most attacks are still aimed at Microsoft. One can rest assure though, that the attacks on other browsers will increase on Mozilla and others as their usage increases. Also keep in mind that both IE and Firefox have had vulnerabilities reported since reporting period for this study ended.
While there is a lot of other great information in the report, one of the keys to strong security on the computer is in the browser. This shows that there is no perfectly safe browser and that the more one is used, the more it will be attacked.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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