I have been tickled pink by the recent security alert for Internet Explorer (PC version) which led to a number of respected organisations (including some close to the US government) recommending that people should seek out alternative browsers such as Firefox or Opera.
What tickled me was not that there was yet another security problem with IE but that it involved a combination of IE and Microsoft’s webserver (IIS). Now, the argument often made about why there are no viruses for Mac OS X is that it isn’t worth targetting OS X machines because there aren’t so many of them (to some extent this is true of course). However, IIS is not the most common web server so I find it odd that the attackers chose to hack IIS instead of the open source Apache which a majority of sites run on.
This is possibly an entirely spurious line of thought but I thought it interesting nonetheless.
Posted 3 July 2004, 14:30 BST
