Via their ‘beauty of the web’ launch site, Microsoft demonstrate the capabilities of their new browser, claiming ‘near high definition’ quality images, that capitalise on the power of your desktop’s graphics processor, utilising Windows OS to deliver superior quality video to users:

“With Internet Explorer 9, we’re tapping into your graphics processor through Windows to harness the full potential of your PC. It makes HD video smoother, colors truer, graphics clearer, and websites more responsive. Combined with our new JavaScript engine, the web now performs like an application installed directly on your computer”.

In conjunction with hardware acceleration, Microsoft have focused on the security settings available to users; many of the privacy functions available on the new IE9 browser are set by default, rather than being selected manually; for example, keystrokes will be kept private; unless settings are actively changed or updated by users, to receive search suggestions, you must first specify a search engine you want to share your keystrokes with.

Microsoft highlight this as one of the key features available with IE9, as well as the provision of tools to prevent people being tracked in their movements from site to site, for the purposes of online behavioral advertising; limiting a commercial firms ability to profile users and tailor advertisements to match their browsing habits.  Additional tools are available in IE9 that alert users to threats posed by any unexpected downloads, and will spot when a virus or trojan attempts to compromise a computer’s security.

As you would expect, Microsoft have tailored the capabilities of IE9 inline with user friendly features available in Windows 7, letting you pin sites you might frequent to the Taskbar; as well as providing notifications when the content of a website is updated, and utilising ‘jump lists’ for easy access and navigation of applications.

Following in the footsteps of Mozilla, in their ‘standards support’ summary, Microsoft have provided a vindication for their interest in web programmers and developers, and outlined Microsoft’s objective to make their lives easier in the long run:  “Through our investments in standards and interoperability, we hope to help bring predictability to web programming [...] you can spend less time rewriting your sites to work across browsers”.

With the booming industry of web apps, and users embracing this market at an ever increasing rate; Microsoft have little choice but to invest in the development of a flexible browsing experience; with competition posed by non-browser traffic such as that generated by mobile phones and tablets, in order to hold onto their share of the market, Microsoft will have to keep up to date with other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, and maintain an open approach to web browsing for both users and developers.

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Get Safe Online believe that the perpetrators behind the scam are members of organised gangs who set up call centres specifically to target people in large quantities, sometimes employing up to four hundred people at a time to solicit data from their victims. The organisation have also warned that many people fall prey to pop-ups online which offer anti-virus services and tell surfers that their computers have been infected.

Google announced earlier in the year that they had found a hue number of malicious codes purporting to be anti-virus software. According to reports, the police and government are supporting the crack down on this form of cyber crime. The new wave of scareware code has been developed in order to harvest credit card details from online users. In many cases, the fake code is indistinguishable from real software solutions. Call centres are thought to be set up in Asia and Europe to gather personal data through cold-calling. The data is then either used by the criminals or sold on to other organisations.

A spokesperson from the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) e-crime unit has commented: “In recent cases, we have seen gangs employing 300 to 400 people to run their operations and using call centre-scale set ups to target victims en masse. They can also be paying out as much as $150,000 (£92,000) a month to individual webmasters who are unwittingly advertising their fake software – this level of investment from criminals indicates that the returns are much heftier than this.”

A criminologist from Surrey university has stated: “The general public is more internet security-aware than it was five years ago. Malicious anti-virus scams are an indication that criminals are now tapping into this. Rather than exploiting our ignorance – the basic premise of common scams such as phishing – they are actively using our knowledge and fear of online threats to their advantage.”

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This was followed by holes found in Adobe Reader and Flash Player and perhaps unsurprisingly; Internet Explorer 7 and Windows MPEG2 ActiveX control.

Suspicious PDF file downloads were the top method for web based attacks representing nearly half of them. The report also found 6 attacks on Internet Explorer, 1 targeting Adobe’s Shockwave Flash and 2 that targeted MPEG2 ActiveX controls.

Although Internet Explorer was the most attacked browser it only had 45 reported vulnerabilities whereas Mozilla’s Firefox had 169, this shows that attacks are often based on the availability of a programs exploit code.

Surprisingly only one browser has less vulnerabilities found than Internet Explorer; the new kid on the block Opera only had 25, with Apple’s Safari showing 94 and Google’s Chrome had 46 found.

All of the browsers had fairly similar windows of exposure which worked out to be roughly 1 day. This refers to the timescale between when an exploit code affecting a vulnerability id made public and when it is patched.

Chrome and Safari showed the worst results in this with Chrome taking 2 days and Safari taking its time with 13 days.

The report would appear to have shown negatives for all of the browsers but the prevailing story will inevitably be the validation of just how vulnerable Microsoft’s Internet Explorer really is.

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The new patch will fix a critical vulnerability that seems to have been consistently exploited by hackers, most notably at the recent Pwn2Own browser hacking competition in the US.

The cumulative update, which was rolled out to users on Tuesday will apparently resolve 9 flaws that have been reported to Microsoft privately and 1 flaw that has been publicly disclosed.

This is evidently a big issue for Microsoft as some of the more severe vulnerabilities present in the Internet Explorer browser could have disastrous consequences if they were hacked. An intrusion could lead to a remote code execution and a complete and utter takeover of the computer being hacked if the user were to accidentally view a malicious or harmful website using Internet Explorer.

Users of Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 in tandem with each other are apparently not vulnerable to the flaw according to Microsoft, but this is not to say that this combination of operating system and browser cannot be hacked at all.

Software effected by the Internet Explorer vulnerability includes pretty much all Windows operating systems from the last decade including Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista and even Windows 7.

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