Firefox and Opera are the browsers of choice for criminal hackers who run websites to launch malware attacks on unsuspecting internet users, a new study has discovered.

V3.co.uk reported on the recent research carried out by Purewire, which discovered that 46 per cent of tracked hackers are Firefox fans while a further 26 per cent use Opera, even though the latter has no more than a two per cent market share.

Rik Ferguson, the senior security advisor at Trend Micro, believes this may be due to the smaller footprint the systems have, though it is not an issue of them being safer than the likes of Internet Explorer - just that they have a smaller online presence.

He told V3 of the reasons hackers use such open source browsers: "They don't want to get compromised themselves. They stand to lose a lot - the profits of their criminal operations, control of botnets and so on - so they're looking after themselves."

Initially released in November 2004, Firefox is now on the stable release of version 3.5.2.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent).