Critical vulnerability exploit found in Internet Explorer

Microsoft has confirmed the discovery of a critical security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that affects all versions of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft recently announced that a new critical security exploit for all versions of Internet Explorer is in the wild, meaning that it is actively being used by hackers to attack computers. Currently, it appears that only Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are affected, but the vulnerability exists for Internet Explorer 6 all the way to Internet Explorer 11.

The large number of potentially vulnerable Internet Explorer versions makes this bug critical, in particular as the found vulnerability is of the type that allows hackers to perform drive-by attacks. This means that a user can become infected by simply visiting a website which contains malicious code snippets. This is also one of the top ways to infect and hack a computer.

At present, no security fix is available but Microsoft assures that it is working very actively on a fix. Until then, Microsoft has released a temporary bug fix through the Fixit tool. Using this bug fix, the users are protected by the type of attacks that have been discovered so far, however, it does not technically fix the vulnerability. Therefore, users may still become infected if the attack code evolves and mutates.

The safest approach for users is to, at least, temporarily switch to another web browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome until a security patch is released by Microsoft.