In case you haven’t heard elsewhere, there’s a nifty unpatched vulnerability for Internet Explorer floating around. And it’s actively being exploited. Metasploit, an exploit toolkit used by penetration testers and script kiddies alike, is able to detect and utilize it.
Under these circumstances, Microsoft has been known to rush out a patch before the next scheduled Patch Tuesday, but the Christmas and New Year’s holidays will obviously slow things down.
In the meantime, installing Firefox and/or Chrome is prudent. I have and use both, since, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a time yet when both of the two most popular alternative browsers had unpatched exploits in the wild.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
One of the first things I do on a home users computer is tell them about Firefox and install it. Fast, easy, and when I come back, even months later, they are nearly always still using it. I consider it basic 101 computing.
Oh and I install adblock plus too with easylist and easyprivacy. They love that.