The following tips for safer browsing are here to help users stay safe online. Choose the following recommendations that work for you, ignore the others. Unfortunately, some of the points turn conveniences into obstacles. No single point will block all attacks. In any case, all of these practices have counter examples that show its ineffectiveness.
Tips for Safer Browsing
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For security, keep the browser and its plugins updated. Nothing prevents malware from using a zero-day exploit (an attack against a vulnerability that is not known to the software vendor or otherwise publicly known). Many examples of malware have targeted vulnerabilities one month to one year old. Those are the patches that could have and should have been applied to prevent a site from compromising the browser.
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For privacy, keep the browser and its plugins updated. Browser developers continue to add user-configurable settings for privacy policies. Updated browsers also close implementation quirks used by fingerprinting techniques.
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For privacy, turn on Do Not Track headers in your browser. This does not guarantee that a tracking network will honor the setting, but it can provide an incremental improvement.
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Be cautious about clicking “Remember Me” links. Anyone with physical access to the browser may be able to impersonate the account because the remember function only identifies the user, it doesn’t re-authenticate the user. This also places the account at risk of cross-site request forgery attacks because a persistent cookie keeps the user authenticated even if the site is not currently opened in a browser tab.
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Limit password re-use among sites with different levels of importance to you. Passwords are hard to remember, but relying on a single one for all sites is unwise regardless of how complex and strong you suspect the password to be. At the very least, use a unique password for your main email account. Many web sites use email addresses to identify users. If the password is ever compromised from one of those web sites, then the email account is at risk. Conversely, compromising an email account exposes account on other sites that use the same password for authentication.
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Secure the operating system by using a firewall. Apply the latest security patches.
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Beware of public WiFi hotspots that do not provide WPA access. Using such hotspots is the equivalent of showing your traffic to the world (at least, the world within the wireless signal’s range—which may be greater than you expect). At the very least, visit sites over HTTPS or, preferably, tunnel your traffic over a VPN.
Note: Browser updates don’t always check the status of browser plugins. Make sure you keep track of the plugins you use and keep them current just as you would the browser itself.
Two sites to help with this are:
Useful Plugins
The Firefox community has a wealth of plugins available to extend, customize, and secure the browser. NoScript offers in-browser defenses against some types of cross-site scripting, common cross-site request forgery exploits, and clickjacking. The benefits of NoScript are balanced by the relative knowledge required to configure it. For the most part, the extension will block browser attacks, but in some cases may break a web site or falsely generate a security notice. If you’ve used plugins like GreaseMonkey then you’ll likely be comfortable with the configu-ration and maintenance of NoScript.
The EFF sponsors the HTTPS Everywhere plugin for Firefox and Chrome. This plugin changes the browser’s default connection preference from HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS. It only works for sites that provide HTTPS access to their content. The plugin remains useful, but the real solution requires site owners to fully implement HTTPS or HSTS to maintain encrypted traffic to the browser.
Published on Wed 22 February 2017 by Macy Leftwing in Security with tag(s): browser