Ok lets see how many of you guys are behind the times. If you use ANY version of Internet Explorer from Microsoft, you know that browser with the big blue E on your desktop, Microsoft wants you to update to IE8 even though it's still vulnerable. My suggestion however is much more logical. This statement was issue by Microsoft after it became publicly known that there was a
zero day attack aimed at Google.
...the vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution.
Now another check on how far people really are across the web on this one, is that the flaw was found and executed on IE6 which is still the predominate version of IE used across the internet. IE6 sucks by the way for more reason than I feel like talking about here, especially to web designers. So my mission to swap as many people and companies over to IE8 has been ongoing for well over a couple months before this was an issue. BUT what Microsoft and several security experts also let everyone know is that IE7 and IE8 are also vulnerable to this attack as well. Way to go MS.
To help protect our customers, we recommend that all customers immediately upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Customers should also consider applying the workarounds and mitigations provided in our Security Advisory such as putting Internet zone security settings to High
Other measures recommended by Microsoft include running the browser in Protected Mode and ensuring users aren't running with administrator privileges. But who does this? Guess what, I don't have to do this with Chrome, Firefox, or safari........
Microsoft says it's considering issuing a fix outside of the regular Patch Tuesday cycle to address the issue. How gracious of them. My suggestion is have your own patch Tuesday and fix the problem by yourself by swapping to the ever vigilant Firefox. Chrome is also very strong and Safari is just as fast as both of them. Considering the time we live in now, who still uses IE for anything but Windows updates?? Get with the times!!
