Friday, November 25, 2011

Update your parents browser day

 So after you ate all your turkey and went shopping like it was the end of the world what else can be done? How about taking part of a movement to help make the web a safer place? Today is update your parents browser day, a movement with a goal to rid the world of all out dated browsers. According to recent stats from W3 Schools 1.3 percent of IE users are still using IE 6. Yes this is the internet explorer version that was released in August 2001. According to Stat Counter IE 6 was the 10th most popular browser version this month on sites with the Stat Counter plugin installed.. Also according to that same chart Firefox 3.6 is the 6th most popular browser this month. Though not as outdated as IE 6 I always recommend having the latest version of your internet browser installed.

 So what are the the risks of running an old web browser? First computers with out dated web browsers are open to more security vulnerabilities due to unpatched security holes. In fact according to Secunia Internet Explorer 6 in its life time had 260 vulnerabilities and 155 Secunia advisory's. Lets compare that to Internet Explorer 7 which has 186 vulnerabilities and 58 Secunia advisories, Internet Explorer 8 has 112 vulnerabilities and 26 advisories, and Internet Explorer 9 which so far has only had 26 vulnerabilities and 4 advisories. As you can see with that trend the latest browsers are much safer then an out dated one.

  However if you are going to take the time to do this for your parents I recommend taking it one step beyond. Secure your whole parents machine and give it a tune up. Make sure they have the latest AV version install and it has the latest malware database loaded. Make sure you don't see any malware their AV may have missed. Also remove old programs they no longer use so their hard drive is cleaned up. Then run Windows Update and make sure they have the latest patched downloaded and installed.

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