Microsoft takes action to beat the hackers

Jan 21 2010 by Iain Laing, The Journal

MICROSOFT is working to patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser that may have allowed Chinese hackers access to human rights activists' email accounts.

The US giant issues patches at a set time each month but said that the attention the problem had received forced it to move more quickly, especially as the bad publicity surrounding the problem had pushed people to use other browsers such as Firefox.

It spoke out after French and German governments advised people to use other browsers because security experts had found evidence of malicious use of the hole.

Security firm Sophos said now it had seen “copycat” sites trying to exploit the vulnerability. “Though numbers are still very low, over the past 24 hours or so we have seen a few sites serving up malicious code attempting to exploit the vulnerability,” it said in a blog post.

If a web user were to visit a compromised site using a vulnerable browser, they could become infected with a “trojan horse”, allowing a hacker to take control of the computer and potentially steal sensitive information.

Rivals are catching up as web surfers turn to Microsoft rivals. Web analytics company StatCounter Firefox is now a close second to Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe, with 40% of the market compared to Microsoft’s 45% share. In some markets, including Germany and Austria, Firefox has overtaken IE.

Microsoft said it had now decided to take action. Microsoft’s general manager of the firm’s trustworthy computing security group George Stathakopoulos said: “Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability.”

“We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update is the right decision at this time.”