What's New: Emergency Internet Explorer Patch Released Today

At noon CST today Microsoft will release a special patch via Windows Update to fix a "critical" security bug in several versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express that could allow attackers to compromise a user's PC. The flaw affects IE 5 through IE 8 beta, and also e-mail client Outlook Express as well, if attackers were to send the attack code in e-mails. Some researchers report as many as 6,000 web sites are already infected with code to exploit this flaw.

ITS recommends all users run Microsoft Update or Windows Update as soon as possible to install the latest critical updates. Today's patch will install on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008, for Internet Explorer 5, 6, and 7. This patch will also work for Outlook Express since it uses Internet Explorer to render HTML e-mails. A separate patch for Internet Explorer 8, which is still in beta test, will be released on Thursday.

Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008 11:31 am CST

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