Chapter 1. The Problem with the Blue E

On July 6, 2004, US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and public and private sectors that protects the nation's Internet infrastructure) released a security report in response to a frightening new security attack.

The infection began on June 24, 2004, when a menace named Download.Ject first made its appearance. Criminals secretly compromised the machines hosting the web sites of several banks, stores, auction sites, and search engines, by taking advantage of a hole in Microsoft's web server software. After taking over the servers, the crooks placed programming code on them so that if you requested a web page from one of the sites, a program was insidiously installed on your computer. This powerful little program could not only place a back door on your computer that would allow hackers to take it over and control it without your knowledge, but could also install keylogging software that would capture passwords and credit card numbers as you typed them.

I left out one important detail, however: in order to be the victim of this infection, you had to be using Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer (IE). If you were using any other web browser, you were perfectly safe. The contagion couldn't affect you.

US-CERT offered several recommendations in its report, but the last caught the eyes of system administrators and users all over the world: "Use a different web browser." That's rightthe computer security experts at the Department of Homeland Security were advising people to use something other than IE, because Microsoft's web browser was that dangerous.

That's pretty bad. How did we get to this point, where the browser employed by almost 90% of all web users enables gangsters across the world to steal your credit card details with ease? Are there any safe alternatives to IE, or are we stuck with this deeply flawed software?

To answer those questions, we need to take a look at the history of web browsers.