NY Times: PC’s Vulnerable to Security Breaches, Experts Say

“A computer user’s vulnerability to attack does not depend as
much on which Web site is visited as on what software is used to
gain access to the Internet, experts say.”

“In recent years, experts have exposed a number of security
holes in browsing software. In general, however, e-mail programs
are the software most vulnerable to intrusion, said Richard
Smith, an Internet security consultant in Cambridge, Mass.

That is because a trojan horse attack can come in the form of a
malicious program attached to a piece of e-mail or, in some
instances, can be carried within the e-mail message itself. In
either case, these programs end up on a computer’s hard drive,
where they can do many kinds of mischief. For example, some have
been known to capture passwords by monitoring the victim’s
keystrokes. This has been a common attack on AOL.”

Complete Story