Firefox or IE? Strange answer to security question

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Statistics explanation

However, when client honeypots with these browsers surfed to a list of about 30,000 known exploit servers, the URLs that resulted in a 0.5735% of successful compromises of Internet Explorer 6 SP2 did not cause a single successful attack on Firefox 1.5.0 or Opera 8.0.0.

I don't understand what that statistic means. If these were 30,000 known exploit servers, shouldn't there have been a 100% compromise rate?

Also, what were the client machines? Were they all configured the same or was this a sample of actual users on the Internet who happened to be using IE6 SP2? If these were actual users and it turns out that only 0.5% of IE6 SP2 users who naviated to a known exploit server were compromised, it certainly blows away the frothing at the mouth claims of "you are 100% certain to be compromised if you use IE6" from the ABMer zealots.

It would also be interesting to know what kept the 99.5% of IE6 SP2 users safe even while they were surfing to known exploit servers. If the only difference between the 99.5% and the 0.5% was that the 99.5% had auto updates on, then this study would suggest that IE6 SP2, combined with auto updates, is actually a fairly safe way of surfing the Internet. Not the safest, no, but nowhere near as bad as certain people (with blatant anti-MS agendas) would like to suggest.

Oh, and I use Firefox so I'm certainly not biased in favor of IE. I'm just curious exactly what that statistic meant since it wasn't very well explained.

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 08/27/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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