U.S. Government suggests users to switch from Internet Explorer

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has advised users not to use Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer browser until a fix is found for the security flaw which can be used by hackers to launch attacks.

The serious security flaw came to light on last Saturday after FireEye Research Labs, an Internet security software company announced it on their blog. The
Cybersecurity software maker said that a group of hackers have been exploiting the bug but declined from naming specific victims or the group of hackers.

The company spokesman said that the target seems to be aimed at U.S.-based firms, that are related to defense and financial sectors. For now one way to protect against hacking is switching to another browser.

http://www.fireeye.com/blog/uncategorized/2014/04/new-zero-day-exploit-targeting-internet-explorer-versions-9-through-11-identified-in-targeted-attacks.html

In an advisory released on Monday morning, the United States Computer Emergence Readiness Team said that the vulnerability in IE versions 6 to 11 could lead to the complete compromise of an affected system.

As per Microsoft, the vulnerability allows a hacker to control an affected system and view, change or delete data or even creating accounts which would give a hacker full user rights.

Currently Microsoft is rushing to fix a bug in the widely used Internet Explorer browser. However PCs running Windows XP will not get any updates regarding the fix as Microsoft has stopped supporting the 13-year-old OS earlier this month. About 15 to 25 percent of the world’s PCs are estimated to be still running on Windows XP.