If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest internet news, Google (Google China) was hacked in 2009 by sophisticated Chinese hackers. Google wasn’t the only one attacked, though (but the largest company, no doubt):

“At least 34 companies, including Adobe, Symantec, Yahoo and Dow Chemical, were attacked, according to industry sources.”

Whether or not it was a government sponsored attack is irrelevant here (let the FBI/NSA/CIA figure it out, our tax dollars pay for that sort of thing). The common thread in all the attacks is that Internet Explorer was exploited and used to gain access to the infrastructures of these companies.

Do you still use Internet Explorer? The version doesn’t matter, even 8 still sucks. Ask yourself why. If Symantec, Google, Adobe and Yahoo couldn’t protect themselves from an Internet Explorer exploit, what makes you think you can? Google even has the cajones to come out and publicly lambast China and denounce Microsoft XP/IE6 and urge users to move away from Internet Explorer (props to Google).

Switch today. There are plenty of better and more secure browsing options out there. Our personal favorite in the office is Google Chrome. It is lightweight, extremely fast, secure, and works great with web apps like Gmail and Google Wave. It has the fastest javascript engine and pages load lightening quick. Apple’s Safari is also secure, but not as fast as Google Chrome. Opera is also plenty fast and secure as well. There is also Mozilla Firefox, which isn’t as fast, and becomes more insecure the more plugins you add into to it, due to how plugins run with all permissions. Personally I think Firefox is bloated and slow, but it was the first real alternative to Internet Explorer after Netscape left the scene some years ago.

Lastly, if you are still using Windows 98, 2000, XP, its time to move on. Don’t leave your front door open and then complain when your home is robbed. Windows 7 is great, OSX is great, and if you are feeling adventurous, try out Ubuntu.

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