Hackers use Opera as defense against other cybercriminals

Atlanta-based Purewire has come forward with the somewhat startling revelation that 26 percent of hackers use the Opera web browser as a means to protect themselves from other cyber criminals. This is a huge contrast to the meager two percent of the market currently commanded by the browser.

The reason, explained Paul Royal, a principal security researcher with Purewire, is that even these hackers "know that the [Opera] browser isn't targeted by other hackers" due to the small market share compared to the likes of Internet Explorer or Firefox. The result is that these criminals are much more likely than the average user to use Opera.

Ironically, Purewire managed to find out what it did by exploiting a bug in the analytics software that is bundled with a couple of popular hacker toolkits. What do you use as your primary browser, and why?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld

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