Microsoft Issues Urgent Windows Update to Protect Internet Explorer and Office Products   - 878 Views,

Microsoft has just announced an emergency patch for both Internet Explorer (IE) and Office Products, and it is recommended that everyone install this patch ASAP (link to patch included below). This affects Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as well as any Microsoft Office Product with ActiveX, including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Access.

With respect to the ActiveX issue, in fact, explains Microsoft IE Program Manager Jerry Bryant, “To prevent exploitation, we recommend that customers disable ActiveX Controls in Microsoft Office.”

Bryant promised that this current emergency update for Internet Explorer “will patch all attack avenues, including the Office document vector.”

In addition, Microsoft is nearly begging all users to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), if they haven’t already. Even though the patch closes a hole in IE8 as well, IE8 is considered to be a much more secure product than IE6, which many users are still using.

The emergency patch for IE will patch the security hole that has allowed hackers to break into dozens of corporate network systems, including those of Google and Adobe. In each case, the security flaws in IE allowed the hackers to steal data from the systems into which they had hacked.

According to Microsoft, “The vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution.”

Explains George Stathakopoulos, on the Microsoft Security Response Center site, “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,” adding that “We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously, given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update out-of-band update is the right decision at this time.”

Here is the link to read about and download the Microsoft emergency security update for Internet Explorer and ActiveX.