I keep circling around the Google (GOOG)/China story and its relationship to the security vulnerability of Microsoft (MSFT) Internet Explorer (IE).
I am sorry to say I am not looking at it from the perspective of Chinese dissidents' emails. It is not interesting to me that Eric Schmidt briefed Obama aides and Congressional leaders about it while they were in the process of cleaning out my Medicare account. I don't care if fifty open source blogoblatherers hate Microsoft.
Instead I am interested because I mostly use IE on Windows XP, which is where the most vulnerability appears to be (except that I use IE 7 instead of IE 6.) For why I never switched to Vista, see this post which details the major Vista flaw discovered by my grandson Owen.
But I have yet to see a trade press story that explains what happened very clearly. I have avoided trying to research it myself because from an IT investment point of view Google leaving China will probably increase its profits, not lower them.
So according to IDG news service this is how it works:
"A hacker could use the code to run unauthorized software on a victim's computer by tricking them into viewing a maliciously crafted Web page. That's apparently what happened at Google late last year, when hackers were able to get into the company's internal systems. According to people familiar with the incident, 33 other companies were also targeted by the attack, including Adobe Systems. On Thursday, Symantec and Juniper Networks said they were investigating the incident, and Yahoo, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical have also been named as victims in published reports.
So OK, as always, I'm OK if I don't use Microsoft IE to open up web pages I am not familiar with sent to me as links in emails from people I don't know (and who clearly do not write English as a first language and address me as "Sir" and claim to be a low-level bank employee in a desperately poor third world country).
But is that what "happened at Google late last year?" Are Google employees sitting around reading emails from Nigerians instead of playing Foosball? And are "Google internal systems" using Microsoft Internet Explorer?
Please, Bill Snyder, get on this story.
-- Dennis Byron
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