Secure Internet Browsing

Just read an article over at Internet News – Which Top Apps Have the Most Security Holes? and to my surprise Firefox was right up there on first place.

I consider myself a pretty safe Internet surfer, doing the obvious and making sure that I do not visit a website that could put my PC at risk.

A long time ago when I started to use Firefox and became a fan hooked on add-ins and tabbed browsing, I decided to continue to use Internet Explorer exclusively for banking. On the Firefox side I also take preventative measures including a couple of add-ins which I think are critical. The first is Adblock Plus and the second is NoScript.

This practice makes even more sense now, although I constantly make sure that I keep up with security updates.

For enterprises, the fact spells trouble — especially since many of these apps slip in without IT knowing. Additionally, the news comes as businesses face growing security threats, punctuated by a slew of recent data breaches, while also contending sharply reduced spending on IT projects.

What is surprising is that Microsoft showed up at number 10 with only Microsoft Windows Live Messenger. I have to say that Microsoft has done a superb job and mastered patch deployment and as long as you have an Internet connection and automatic updates turned on you’re half way there.

Additional measures I have decided not to take is to privatize my Internet browsing. A couple of popular practices are to tunnel your browsing through your home Internet connection in order to prevent your employer from snooping or blocking web traffic and the other is to anonymize the traffic either by going through a proxy or using a product that will rotate source IP addresses every time a connection is made (onion routing), making it virtually impossible to analyze the traffic.

Unfortunately I believe that once you get online, there is really no way to cover your tracks. There is nothing that isn’t traceable and if someone wants to find you bad enough they will so keep it legal.