Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Internet Explorer 8 (and below), security, Trojan horses...


There's definitely something wrong with Internet Explorer (Weird things that I don't see happen in Firefox or Opera with exactly the same Websites). These are the facts: 1) Pages with Flash player ask for an "update" even if the latest version is installed; 2) When going to msn.com (from New York City) it always asks me if my location is Canada or the US and no matter how many times I say I am in the United States (!), it will revert to asking the same question; 3) Trojan horses have a way to get into your system through Internet Explorer AND Firefox (that's my assumption) and spread to other applications (see MS Access screenshot on the right). For this last occurrence take for example the Trojan horse iolo System Shield caught the other day (IFrame.gen). I looked it up, but, curiously enough, the iolo System Shield that caught it did not provide information about it, so I googled it, and one of the search results "happened to be" (?!) a Website for a Chinese "antivirus company", which surely enough after having visited it my menus changed to Chinese language (!!!). To Microsoft credit I have to say that once I downloaded and installed the security updates and fixes, this menu option in Chinese disappeared. PLEASE NOTE: the Trojan Horse was however in the Firefox cache (!) so now I'm not sure if I should try Opera or Chrome instead.
And all of these is happening when I reinstalled Vista in a new hard drive. Other that these Internet Explorer annoyances my system is working perfectly well, thanks. So, I would ask the Microsoft techies (and yes the Firefox techies, too!) to please fix these annoyances and security lapses asap! For the time being I'm avoiding Internet Explorer as much as I can but I'm becoming uneasy with Firefox as well. In addition, let me say here that Microsoft Security Essentials, the free antivirus, antimalware and antispyware (also installed in my computer) never was aware of this Trojan horse. On the other hand, do not trust Google or any other search engine to find information about viruses, the search results links provided are loaded and will most likely get you directly into the hands of the virus, malware and spyware bad guys, go directly to the trusted Internet security companies Websites, instead.