An email from my friend, Michelle Delio who writes for Wired and covers malware.
I'm sure you all have friends who use PCs, and for those who you can't
convert to Mac (like me) or to Linux then please strongly suggest they stop
using Internet Explorer and use another browser ASAP -- I'd recommend
Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla, (or, if they like -- i don't -- Opera).
I'll spare you the details unless you want them, but the more i see of what
malicious hackers can do with explorer the more i know explorer is a totally
unsafe option if you have *any* info on your computer that you don't want to
share with the rest of the world.
It's way to easy to grab bank account #'s, passwords, credit card info --
anything -- off a computer that is running explorer, via various exploits.
It doesn't matter if your system is patched, if you have antivirus enabled,
if you are careful where you go online or don't ever download dodgy software
-- explorer is not secure and I don't believe it can be made secure.
And then there's spyware... (download and run spybot from
www.safer-networking.org/. Chances are you'll freak out at what it finds,
but after you let it rip all the crap from your machine you'll likely see a
perfomance boost.)
If you must use explorer for some bizarre reason turn javascripting off and
run a firewall -- a real one, not the one that microsoft ships with OS XP.
Besides the critical security reasons, mozilla -- especially firefox -- is a
much better browser. www.mozilla.com. It wouldn't hurt to dump Outlook
either, but Explorer on PCs is a bad thing. (note: unless you know what
you're doing don't uninstall explorer, you'll need it for some stuff. Just
don't use it on the web unless you absolutely have to, like when you're
grabbing a patch from microsoft's automated update service.)
I know that virtually all "tell all your friends" messages are almost always
hoaxes, this isn't. Do a search for "js.scob.trojan" . Note that the
security hole that allowed this to happen has not yet been patched. It's not
the only one. It really is time to dump explorer.
Obviously, feel free to forward this, if you like.
-Michelle
