Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost market share in major European markets, such as France, Britain and Italy, after the U.S. software firm started to make it easier for European consumers to use competing browsers. Microsoft’s pledge to allow easier access to rival browsers in Windows by the middle of May, ended a long antitrust dispute with the European Union. The company has started to send a choice screen, where consumers can easily click on rival browsers, to almost 200 million old and new computers. According to web statistics firm Statcounter, Internet Explorer’s share of all Web surfing has in March dropped in France by 2.5 percentage points from February, in Britain by 1 percentage point and in Italy by 1.3 points.
Google is going to stop supporting IE 6, since vulnarabilities in this version of the popular web browser caused recent attacks on a lot of companies including Google. The security hole in IE allowed the hacker to install a trojan program on the users computer after visiting certain websites. Previously German anf French government have already called for IE 6 usage ban, and even though Microsoft has reacted to this problem and the security patch has been released three weeks earlier then planned, it didn’t stop Google and now the Google Docs and Google Sites will not work under Internet Explorer 6.
Microsoft has recommended all users who have not yet upgraded to IE 8 from IE 6 version to do so now, since the main reason behind the recent attacks on a number of well-known companies was greatly because of IE 6 security hole. IE 8 users have not encountered any problems during this period, may be because IE 8 has some of the security options turned on by default. For Windows XP users it is also recommended to upgrade to SP3 to further enhance security.
Microsoft said it is working around the clock to patch an Internet Explorer 6 software hole through which China-based cyber spies attacked Google and other firms. Microsoft is testing a security fix and will make it available as soon as it is ready instead of following its protocol of releasing security updates the second Tuesday of each month. Revealing the attacks on January 12, Google said they originated from China and targeted the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world but did not explicitly accuse the Chinese government of responsibility.
After Microsoft has agreed that the recent attacks on Google were partly because of the Internet Explorer security breach, German Federal Office for Information Security called to find an alternative browser to replace the world’s most common one. The Microsoft represantative in Germany questions this judgement, saying that attacks on Google were made by very dedicated people with certain purpose, and therefore do not concern the majority of users.
December 21st, 2009
admin
A dangerous vulnerability in Internet Explorer became known to publicity before a fix was available, raising the probability of zero-days attacks. The new bug involves the way IE handles Cascading Style Sheets objects(CSS is currently the most popular web-design technique), and could allow an attacker to execute any type of code on a targeted Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, or Server 2008 computer. Internet Explorer 8 was not affected by this bug, and currently you can аix the vulnerability with a patch.
November 26th, 2009
admin
The Microsoft Internet Explorer security bug that was disclosed last week yet again takes our attention – this time developers of the open-source Metasploit penetration testing toolkit have released code that can compromise IE browser, however the code cannot be called reliable. As the developers said tehmselves – the bug is unreliable, you can’t be sure that you will be able to compromise one’s browser. As stated by Microsoft – there hasn’t yet been any attacks using this exploit in the wild. As stated by the software giant, only IE versions 6 and 7 may be effected and Microsoft has already released a Security Advisory that offers workarounds to guard against the flaw.