The Tangled Web

The Evolution of a Threat

Clearly, web browsers, and their associated document formats and communication protocols, evolved in an unusual manner. This evolution may explain the high number of security problems we see, but by itself it hardly proves that these problems are unique or noteworthy. To wrap up this chapter, let’s take a quick look at the very special characteristics behind the most prevalent types of online security threats and explore why these threats had no particularly good equivalents in the years before the Web.

The User as a Security Flaw

Perhaps the most striking (and entirely nontechnical) property of web browsers is that most people who use them are overwhelmingly unskilled. Sure, nonproficient users have been an amusing, fringe ...