If you haven’t been living under a rock the past week you have surely heard of the Chinese hacking of Google and several other firms via a browser hole in Internet Explorer.
The bug reported in MS Security Advisory 979352 will be patched tomorrow in a rare out-of-band patch that does not follow Microsoft’s standard patch Tuesday schedule of once a month. The flaw supposedly only affects ie 6 on up, however IE 6 is the only browser that has a known exploit. More information is available in the advisory. There also will be a webanar tomorrow where Microsoft will announce further information. If you run Windows be sure to run windows update tomorrow and apply this critical patch and upgrade to the newest version of Internet Explorer
It also may be a wise idea to follow the advice of Germany, and France and leave IE entirely. I recommend looking into one of several alternatives including: