[b]Microsoft to patch hole in Internet Explorer[/b]
Microsoft will patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser that may have allowed Chinese hackers access to human rights activists’ e-mail accounts.
The firm normally issues patches at a set time each month but said that the attention the problem had received forced it to move more quickly.
It follows the French and German governments decision to advise citizens to use other browsers.
Security experts said they had seen malicious code exploiting the weakness.
If a web user were to visit a compromised site using a vulnerable browser, they could become infected with a “trojan horse”, allowing a hacker to take control of the computer and potentially steal sensitive information.
Microsoft said on 18 January that there were “very few” infected sites on the web.
But Security firm Sophos said now it had seen “copycat” sites trying to exploit the vulnerability.
“Though numbers are still very low, over the past 24 hours or so we have seen a few sites serving up malicious code attempting exploit the vulnerability,” it said in a blog post.
‘Weak link’
The bad publicity has allowed rivals such as Firefox to gain market share.
yeah I was thinking about it earlier today after all the fuss around IE, so no, I haven’t heard anything new about Gazelle for a while…months…
edit: btw it’s a not a new/next version of IE, it’s something completely different, just a project so far, but supposed to be more like a web oriented OS (Windows still needed ;D ) than a simple browser, so with web apps everywhere and sandboxing etc…well IIRC …
more here: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf