It
seems that history is repeating itself with the German government, known
for giving Firefox a leg up in the past, telling users to abandon
Microsoft’s IE for something safer.
The German government is reported to tell its citizens that they should temporarily stop using IE browser due to the discovery of a yet-to-be repaired vulnerability in the Internet browser. The flaw in question is said to make personal computers vulnerable to cyber attacks. The bug was found last weekend and is said to allow a zero day attack to be carried out on machines with Internet Explorer 9.
The German Federal Office for Information Security explained that it knew about targeted attacks. The plan of the hackers was the following: they wanted to lure Internet users to a site where intruders had planted malicious software which exploited the abovementioned IE flaw in order to infect their computers.
So, German authorities announced that a fast spreading of the malicious code should be feared. That’s why it has called on all IE users to switch to an alternative browser until Microsoft has released a security update. In the meantime, Microsoft hasn’t provided any comments over the issue.
According to some media reports, the software giant urged IE users to install a piece of security software instead. The industry experts believe that the company is just buying time to fix the vulnerability and build a new version of the browser. Nevertheless, the fix in question involves the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit. And the latter is believed to be too complicated for most users, so it won’t help.
Until Germany called to abandon the browser, IE was the 2nd-most widely used web browser in the world, accounting for 1/3 of the market.
The German government is reported to tell its citizens that they should temporarily stop using IE browser due to the discovery of a yet-to-be repaired vulnerability in the Internet browser. The flaw in question is said to make personal computers vulnerable to cyber attacks. The bug was found last weekend and is said to allow a zero day attack to be carried out on machines with Internet Explorer 9.
The German Federal Office for Information Security explained that it knew about targeted attacks. The plan of the hackers was the following: they wanted to lure Internet users to a site where intruders had planted malicious software which exploited the abovementioned IE flaw in order to infect their computers.
So, German authorities announced that a fast spreading of the malicious code should be feared. That’s why it has called on all IE users to switch to an alternative browser until Microsoft has released a security update. In the meantime, Microsoft hasn’t provided any comments over the issue.
According to some media reports, the software giant urged IE users to install a piece of security software instead. The industry experts believe that the company is just buying time to fix the vulnerability and build a new version of the browser. Nevertheless, the fix in question involves the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit. And the latter is believed to be too complicated for most users, so it won’t help.
Until Germany called to abandon the browser, IE was the 2nd-most widely used web browser in the world, accounting for 1/3 of the market.
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