42% Of U.S. Internet Explorer Users Hit With Zero Day Exploit

Sites include Microsoft.com . Published on September 28th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Internet Explorer (IE) seems to be every hacker’s dream browser and the latest news surrounding an exploit of the Windows-bundled tool is ample proof.

According to a report from AlientVault, users of IE 7 and 8 needs to be very careful as a new zero-day threat has been discovered that affects the browser. For the threat-uninitiated, a zero-day exploit is threat that has yet to be defined and protected against fully by the world’s online and computing security companies. Just think about those updates you download to your PC from Norton or your favorite anti-virus company as the remedy for zero-day threats.

The trouble with these kinds of security threats is that unless a wide scale response is made quickly, infected computers can wreak havoc across networks. The threat discovered by AlienVault is apparently capable of being executed in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. Basically the word on the street is that of you feel attached to using IE, you probably shouldn’t.

41% of US computer users are affected and 32% worldwide, so in short, it’s a pretty serious threat. Microsoft is working on a fix, but many don’t expect that to come through for weeks.

Final word for people using IE: Unless you want your computer to be turned into a bot which sends out Spam and other nasty stuff, stop using it.

Do you still use Internet Explorer? Let us know what keeps you loyal using the comments below.