posted on Monday, October 04, 2004 10:41 AM
by
demiliani
Why you should switch to Firefox or why you should patch your PC?
I've just finished reading this article on Cnet, "Why you should switch to Firefox".
It's an interesting article but I think that the title is not too much compliant. The article explains the last GDIPLUS.DLL vulnerability and the possible damage associated to it. If you have XP SP2 or a Windows older than the 2000 version you're not affected by this problem, but this is only a theory...
Other common Windows application (such as Office family, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio .NET) are affected by this problem and they can (when loaded) overwrite a patched version if the GDIPLUS.DLL with an older version. So, can you imagine the problem?
I agree that IE is the first vehicle to propagate the JPEG flaw and maybe a switch to a more secure browser is now recommended, but the first recommendation is to patch all your possible way of attacks (Office and similar).