German and French governments advise against using IE

The German and French governments have issued advisories to their citizens asking them to avoid using Internet Explorer as it may be prone to attack by hackers, as was acknowledged by Microsoft in the recent incident involving Google and hackers from China.

Germany warned its citizens ahead of the weekend that continuing to use IE would be risky since the malicious code used by hackers was reportedly published online. Logically, this creates the possibility of copy cat attacks.

Following the German lead, the French government too issued an advisory suggesting that all versions of IE are vulnerable to an attack similar to the one where the corporate infrastructures of Google, Adobe and around 30 other companies were compromised by hackers from China. Germany's BSI advised against using versions 6, 7 and 8 of IE on XP, Vista and Windows 7, while both governments recommended using an alternative browser.

Microsoft had issued an advisory that provided guidance to help people protect themselves while it worked with its Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) and Microsoft Security Response Alliance (MSRA) partners to help provide broader protections for customers. It had said that attacks that leveraged the weakness in its browser “appear to be targeted at corporations” and that it had not come across similar attacks against consumers. The vulnerability that the Chinese hackers exploited affects Internet Explorer 6, IE 7, and IE 8 on Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 R2, as well as IE 6 Service Pack 1 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Microsoft said in its advisory last week.

Microsoft sought to downplay the advisories, countering them with a blog post that said it was monitoring the threat landscape, where it saw “very limited number of targeted attacks against a small subset of corporations.” It said it was not aware of any successful attacks against IE7 and IE8 “at this time.” It said it wanted customers to protect themselves by upgrading to IE8 “to benefit from the improved security protections it offers.” Earlier, Microsoft had said that it was working to develop a patch to cover the vulnerability, though it had not established a time frame for its release.