Video Broadcast: Are Internet Users at Risk?

Google TechTalk

Are Internet Users at Risk?

This is a Google TechTalk given by my friend and research colleague Thomas Dubendorfer covering the content of our papers:

Understanding the Web browser threat
published at DefCon 16, 2008
0-Day Patch - Exposing Vendors (In)security Performance
published at BlackHat 2008

Speaker

Abstract

In a perfect world, Software would be secure and we would not have to care about vulnerabilites that can get exploited while surfing the Internet.However, given that Google found more than 3 million malicious web addresses that try a drive-by download infection on the visitor's web browser, it's better to have a close look at the risk that our users are exposed to when surfing the web.

This talk gives an analysis of how well vendors like Microsoft and Apple are performing regarding fixing reported software vulnerabilities. A strong indicator for the performance is the number of patches, which were not available when a vulnerability was publicly disclosed. The fluctuations in the patching speed also reveals interesting engineering related facts of the companies analyzed.

Further more, the talk compares how well Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera users are doing in terms of following the best practice to always use the latest most secure Web browser version. By extracting browser versions from the user-agent strings in Google's web logs it was found that that more than 600 million Internet users worldwide don't follow this best practice.

Speaker: Thomas Dubendorfer