You may have seen recent alerts about the “Zero Day” vulnerability in Internet Explorer. As part of our work as a secure hosting provider, we wanted to share some quick points about the threat:

Windows OS users are at risk

Zero day  vulnerability allows “remote code execution” – it’s super easy for a hacker to view your Windows OS files or install viruses on your PC via Internet Explorer (and you won’t know it’s happening).

It’s worldwide & widespread

Zero Day affects every version of Internet Explorer currently on the market, from IE 6 upwards.

Other browsers are safe

Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are unaffected – unlike IE, Microsoft won’t let these browsers access Windows OS while you’re surfing the web.

To limit zero day vulnerability impact following actions can help

• Install EMET to protect your PC. As tested by Fireeye, EMET 4.1 and 5 do help to break the exploit.
• This IE vulnerability can use Flash to exploit and bypass some protection techniques from newer version of windows/IE. We strongly recommend to Disable Flash which supports IE 10 and later in windows 8. (Note that you can disable flash as its enabled by default)
• Enable the IE “Enhanced Protection Mode” (EPM) which became available in Internet Explorer 10 and later versions.
• We recommend switching to Firefox and installing Adblock Plus to avoid this vulnerability.

Summary

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