While nothing is perfect, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser may be close to it. The newest improvement: The Mozilla Foundation has released an update, Firefox 1.0.1, to their browser to fix several vulnerabilities, including one that would protect against spoofed domains.
Among other bugs, the updated Firefox 1.0.1 was equipped to fix a vulnerability in the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), a standard for handling special character sets in the domain names that allow companies to register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages. The update will display IDN coding in the address bar to prevent spoofing.
The IDN Vulnerability
The vulnerability allowed an attacker to pull off a phishing scam by creating a fake Web site on a non-Microsoft browser. Phishing scams try to fool consumers into handing over-sensitive or personal information by creating legitimate-looking Web sites and e-mail messages. Instead of taking a user to what they believe is a trusted site, the spoofed URL leads them to a fake site with a domain rendered as the same address under the IDN process.
That's where the update comes in. In defense of such an occurrence, Firefox 1.0.1 will display the IDN Punycode -- the encoding of Unicode strings into the limited character set supported by the Domain Name System and IDN -- in the address bar and prevent false URLs.
The update is available at Mozilla.org for the following operating systems:
Firefox's Rapid Progression
It's updates such as this that make Firefox so popular among users. In fact, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated 25 million downloads of its browser, a landmark achieved in just 100 days. This makes Firefox a more than worthy and capable competitor of Microsoft's virus-ridden Internet Explorer.
Mozilla's free 1.0 program was released in November 2004; an average of 250,000 people download Firefox every day.
CNET News February 24, 2005
Firefox, is a non-profit organization spun off from Netscape. Because Firefox is an open-source browser, anyone can update and modify the code. It also protects against three of the biggest problems facing the Internet:
If you're not currently using Firefox as your browser I would strongly encourage you to read about it in the links below and install this free tool on your system. It really is very easy to do and you will be glad you did. If you have already installed it then I encourage you to download the updated and free version of this unique and versatile browser. If you're not using Firefox yet, I can't urge you enough to review my recent article about the benefits of Firefox
Switching to the Firefox browser will provide you with a number of key benefits, including:
Foxy Tunes: Lets you control just about any media player without leaving your browser.
Googlebar: Will automatically zap those nasty pop-ups and will allow you to search the Web with Google with one click.
Sage: This one is really cool. Firefox will finally have an RSS feed aggregator so now you can finally use your browser to load my blog and my RSS feed. Once you download the browser there will be a little brown RSS square in the bottom title of the screen. All you need to do is click on it to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Therefore, if you haven't done so already, I encourage you to download Firefox now -- it's free at their Web site. Believe me, you'll be glad you did! And for you Mac users out there, there is a version for you (and even one for Linux).
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