Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 are vulnerable to a security flaw known as the “zero day” bug. Don’t just take out word for it: Microsoft has confirmed it in the snappily named Security Advisory (977981). So, if you’re rocking one of those browsers what should you do?
The “zero day” security flaw was revealed on the BugTraq mailing list. Essentially it could allow a hacker to crash Internet Explorer or trick you into visiting a malicious website.
One of the suggested ways of counteracting the issue is disabling JavaScript in IE6 or IE7, but the sheer amount of sites that use JavaScript could make that pretty irritating.
The “zero day” vulnerability affects both Windows XP and Windows Vista users, but as Vista runs Internet Explorer 7 in Protected Mode, XP users have more to worry about.
Microsoft has also said that the exploit can be more difficult to capitalise upon if you enable a feature called Data Execution Protection. Microsoft’s got a fix that’ll enable it for you.
We say keep it simple: upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 or maybe try Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome instead. We’ve done a handy browser comparison to help you out.
Out now | £free | Microsoft
“We say keep it simple: upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 or maybe try Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome instead”
How comes Opera does not get a mention? It’s got 4x the marketshare of Safari and Google (coming in 3rd place behind Firefox and IE), it’s also the best of the bunch in pretty much every aspect. If you value web security, you wouldn’t use anything else. Firefox is a security nightmare.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/10/web_security_survey/
“Of the browser vulnerabilities mapped by Cenzic, Firefox racked up 44 per cent of the total, with Safari bugs making up a 35 per cent slice of the browser vulnerabilities. Internet Explorer was third, with 15 per cent, with Opera copping for six per cent.”
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@Stewart, above: the report doesn’t have much to say about what the bugs are. For all we know, they’re layout bugs – which Mozilla and Webkit browsers have in droves because they attempt support for CSS 3 and HTML 5 – which IE doesn’t even try to do (it still doesn’t support CSS 2.1 properly) and Opera claims to partially support but mostly fails (Opera’s “shortcuts” that are supposed to improve efficiency also completely destroy its ability to implement consistent standards – take it from me, I develop web applications). Security flaws in Opera, such as they are, are probably vastly underreported because nobody cares about Opera. They come up with some interesting ideas, other people hijack them and implement them properly on well-supported platforms
Also I don’t know where you get your use statistics but the W3 reports Opera at 2.3%, behind Chrome at 8.3% and Safari at 3.8% as of November 2009. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
I repeat. Nobody cares about Opera.
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