Industry News Home More stories like this... RSS Feed

Web browsers to be main target for malware

Creators of viruses, malware and other forms of malicious software are likely to move their focus away from Mirosoft's Windows operating system and concentrate on writing software for web browsers, it has been claimed.

According to new research from Symantec, many attacks such as 'drive-by downloads' rely on web browser security flaws to infect people's computers.

The firm claims that as web browsers have evolved, more and more plug-ins and applications have been developed to run within them – making them good targets for malicious attack.

Dave Cole, Symantec's director of security responses said: "With Web 2.0 technologies we've seen so much of the logic that would have been done on the server being done in the browser.

“If I'm a bad guy, and I'm going to make a bet on you having a specific thing, I'm going to bet on you having a browser."

Meanwhile, Google has just released a new version of its Chrome web browser which deals with a major security flaw as well as other issues.