US government recommends anything but IE
Well, I’ve been pushing Firefox as a far better browser then Internet Explorer for a considerable time now, but recently a whole heap of security people around the world are agreeing with me. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (A United States government department) have recently started telling people to find and use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. See The Register for the story.
In short, the story is that once again we are up to our eyeballs in M$ security flaws, and in this instance, the culprits are Internet Explorer and M$ Internet Information Services (IIS) Micro$ofts web server software. What it amounts to, is that any site that runs specific versions of IIS, can be infected by a virus of sorts that adds code to all the pages hosted by the site. Anybody then visiting the site in Internet Explorer runs the new code and tries to download a key logger application from a Russian site, presumably they will use it to steal your personal data. (like credit card numbers and such.)
You can read Microsofts take on it here.
This new critical issue uses 3 flaws in Micro$oft software to do the job, and Microsoft has not yet released security patches for all of them.
Macintosh and of course Linux are as unaffected by this most recent outbreak as any of the previous ones, and Windows users not using Internet Explorer are also unaffected.
My Suggestion stands, go and get the free Mozilla Firefox, not only is it a far better and more featured browser then Internet Explorer, it’s also an order of magnitude more secure. (If you have resisted thus far, I implore you to just try it, you have absolutely nothing to lose.)
regards
Franki