British Internet security company ScanSafe says Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the number one pick on the hack parade, saying they detected more hack attacks through IE than any other hack attack in the first half of 2004.
The company also said that the growth rate of hack threats increased, surprising some of its analysts.
"There's been a 15 percent rise every quarter and the threat is really rising,” said ScanSafe director Roy Tuvey. “The first thing exploited are browser vulnerabilities."
The Exploit.HTML.Mht hack in the second quarter of the year was used to target almost twice as many companies and groups as other exploits, Tuvey said.
One peculiarity ScanSafe said they noticed was a majority of hack attacks happening on Wednesdays, 21 percent, while only 6 percent happen on the weekend. Why? ScanSafe said most viruses launch on a weekend and only begin their fullest spreads in the week to follow.
ScanSafe also said that exploits took up 19 percent of all attacks while spyware-rooted exploits accounted for 12 percent and only ten percent of the attacks they detected happened with email Web sites.
At the same time, Internet Explorer is said to continue losing market share to rival browser Mozilla, with IE share dropping to 84.7 percent in July and 92.9 percent in October, according to WebSideStory, which said the high profile security issues in IE provoking analysts to encourage browser switching played a big role in that drop.
Mozilla’s Suite, Netscape, and Mozilla’s test run of standalone browser Firefox had a 6 percent browser market share at October’s end, up from 3.5 percent in June, WebSideStory said. Analyst Geoff Johnston said that wasn’t so much a fast drop for IE as a fast gain for Mozilla.
"It is not a fast drop for Internet Explorer, but it might be considered a fast gain for Mozilla," said Geoff Johnston, an analyst at WebSideStory.
