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I was watching this video and was shocked that using IE, if you just visit a site, your PC gets infected. Naturally I was curious. There was no window download popup or anything, and the PC victims computer got infected with a Trojan. How is this being done? Does it work for FF3?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 25 '10 at 8:46

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Such attacks make use of security holes in the visiting browser that allow the execution of malicious code on the client`s computer. I theory, any browser can be vulnerable. Such vulnerabilities are usually fixed by the browser vendor, sometimes quicker, sometimes slower.

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Deja Vu, Pekka. Yesterday, on the radio, a local Microsoft spokesman on security matters was asked about problems with Internet Explorer, and whether last week's update would fix them. He replied that in theory all browsers can be vulnerable. He didn't say that some browsers are more vulnerable than others. – pavium Jan 25 '10 at 9:24
I didn't want to get into that for various reasons. Yes, Internet Explorer is extraordinarily often affected by vulnerabilities, and Firefox & consorts seem to be less so (at the moment). I am, however, noticing a dangerous trend of people thinking that only IE is vulnerable and installing Firefox ("much safer") is going to solve all their problems. This is not true, and we will see much more malware targeted at FF in the future due to its growing market share. Every browser is potentially vulnerable to security holes, period. (I install and recommend Firefox whenever I can, by the way.) – Pekka 웃 Jan 25 '10 at 22:04

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