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Emergency IE patch goes live

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CIOL Bureau
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SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Microsoft has released an emergency security update for all versions of Internet Explorer on Thursday as attacks exploiting a critical vulnerability in the widely used browser spread to hundreds of websites.

The patch fixing the IE vulnerability used to penetrate the defenses of Google and other large companies came as anti-virus provider Symantec said the flaw was being exploited on "hundreds of websites." While some of the sites hosting the attacks were free services that had been co-opted, others appeared to be domains of legitimate companies that had been compromised.

The portal quoted Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager for Symantec's Security Response group, as saying "I'd consider this the first widescale attack that's been seen for this,". "The fact that the attacker has gone through the effort to set up hundreds of sites is a good indication of what other attackers are also doing right now. It's highly likely that other attackers will be retooling their attack toolkits to utilize this in driveby downloads to infect users."

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Updates will be automatically installed by systems configured to receive such updates. Those who don't want to wait can manually apply the patch by visiting this link with IE. In an admission that's sure to spark criticism, Microsoft said it learned of the critical bug more than three months ago.

Microsoft said earlier Thursday that it continued to see "limited and targeted attacks against Internet Explorer 6 only." The company nonetheless strongly urged users to install the fix as soon as possible. While Talbot believes the attacks have now gone mainstream, he said none of the attacks he's seen in the wild are successful against versions 7 and 8, thanks to security features Microsoft has baked in to the browser.

(The Register)

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