The ‘Googlehack’ last week in China raised many questions about the safety of personal data online. According to Forbes, it’s not just search engines and their accompanying tools such as email that are suspect – IE is now under fire:
When Google recently disclosed an attack originating from China targeting more than 20 U.S. technology companies, the company revealed only that the attack was “highly sophisticated and highly targeted.” On Thursday McAfee announced that it found at least one of the technological footholds for the attack: a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser….
Europe took the insecurity to heart:
Targeted attacks happen all the time, but a public announcement about these hacks is rare, especially from a company as large as Google ( GOOG – news – people ). Word of the attack spread quickly and the German, French and Australian governments soon issued warnings about using Internet Explorer…
It’s severe enough that MSN is feeling the pinch:
Meanwhile, in Europe, Internet Explorer isn’t fairing so well. Although IE use is generally trending downward worldwide, the news of a “0-day”–a previously unknown IE exploit–and the subsequent warnings about it, has had an accelerating effect on IE’s decline. This week the Internet Explorer franchise hit its lowest-ever market share in Europe, according to the largest data set available from Statcounter, a popular analytics firm. IE market share across Europe has dropped 10 percentage points to 37%, according to the latest numbers; of that, the typical day-to-day variation is 2% to 3%.
Still haven’t managed to definitively pin the attack on the Chinese government, but apparently there have been subsequent attacks made on journalists that echo the hacking of the human rights activists’ accounts, according to CSO:
The Gmail accounts of foreign reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing have been hijacked, a journalists’ group in China said Monday.
The news comes just one week after Google said it had been targeted by recent cyberattacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The U.S. search giant cited the attacks as one reason it has decided to stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may ultimately close its China offices.
The hijacked Gmail accounts used by the journalists in Beijing had been set to forward all e-mails to a stranger’s address, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an e-mail to members. The group did not name the news organizations hit by the attack or say when the hijacking occurred.
A poll determining who is trusted more, IE or Google, would be interesting at this point.