Internet Explorer: A Danger For Windows Machines
On July 06, 2009, Microsoft has made public the existence of a severe security flaw in Internet Explorer, caused by a vulnerability discovered in Microsoft Video ActiveX Control. As a consequence, if any attacker succeeds in exploiting this security leak of Internet Explorer browser, then the user computer could be remotely controlled by the attacker, with the same access rights over the machine resources and data, as the ones corresponding to the owner.
The newly discovered Microsoft Internet Explorer security flaw is a real danger for the computers powered by Microsoft Windows XP SP 2 and Microsoft Server 2003 SP2.
In the same time, even Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 users are not directly affected, due to the existing restrictions imposed to the data passed to Microsoft Video ActiveX Control, there is also recommended the disabling of the support for this ActiveX Control in the case of Vista and Server 2008 versions of Windows operating system, as a defense-in-depth measure.
Microsoft Video ActiveX Control can be disabled manually or automatically by following the steps indicated into this Microsoft Security Advisory article. According to Microsoft, the removal of support for Microsoft Video ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer will not influence the overall application compatibility.
Microsoft works on a Windows security update which will resolve this critical security flaw of Internet Explorer. In the present, there is estimated that the highest percent of Internet users still navigate with Internet Explorer.
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