British government ignores MS browser fears
France, Germany line up to bash Internet Explorer
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France and Germany have already told their citizens to avoid Microsoft's Internet Explorer because of a critical hole in the browser, so what does the British government think?
The problem emerged late last week and both governments reacted with a simple warning - use another browser until this is fixed.
Three days later and still no response from the British government. We're still waiting to hear back from Lord Mandy's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
The weakness is in older versions of Internet Explorer like 6 and 7 which were running Windows XP SP3. The code has now been released making it fairly simple for an attacker to exploit the hole.
Microsoft confirmed that the hole was used in the attacks against Google and 33 other companies believed to come from China.
At its most extreme it would let an attacker run code on your machine.
If you don't want to ditch IE altogether then at least running it in safe mode, with ActiveX and JavaScript turned off, will reduce the dangers.
Internet Explorer is the default browser on government computers. It would be a big job for them to all be changed overnight, but surely the government could offer some advice on keeping the rest of us safe?
The gaping hole might seem like bad news for Microsoft, but most IE users will probably remain unaware of the problem. If enough of them do notice then it might provide a bit of a boost for Firefox and Google's Chrome - currently being heavily advertised in the UK.
Microsoft is still working on plugging the hole which, so far at least, has been used to target corporations rather than individuals. ®
COMMENTS
Define "more secure"
because I think your statement is pure bollocks. For a start you aren't referencing versions, so you are effectively claiming that IE6 is more secure that Ff 3.5, which is laughable. Even assuming you are talking about IE8, "more secure" is a completely subjective concept, given that security depends on architecture, deployed platform, scripting, usage, speed to fix problems, etc. etc.
IE is a perfectly secure browser on a machine which is not connected to a network - I'll give you that.
So define "more secure", and stop just regurgitating marketing-speak.
my innernet browser ...
.. just advised me to replace the current government for fears that it is not very secure!
Do I clixz YES or NO or REMIND ME LATER ?
their own fault
It is Microsoft's own fault that people are stuck with IE6. They did intentionally build a non standard browser and companies that relied on it for their own applications have gotten stuck with it.
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