It’s an odd story unfolding.  A number of very nasty cyber attacks have come out of China recently, hitting at least 20 high-tech companies like Adobe, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Symantec, Yahoo!, and – of course – Google.  Why the “of course” with Google?  Simple.  Google was the only company to go public with information about the attack.

The attack itself is very sophisticated.  It opens a backdoor onto a compromised system to install several pieces of malware.  It then uses port 443, commonly used for HTTPS secure SSL transactions, to pretend to be a connection to a secure website to mask itself while communicating back to the control servers.

But how exactly did all of this nastiness get onto PCs in the first place?

That is as simple as it is strange.

It uses the zero-day exploit CVE-2010-0249 of Internet Explorer 6.

What?

IE6?!

Indeed.

There are, of course, two possible explanations here.  The first is that all of these companies, Google included, still run IE6, in spite of having later versions of IE available, not to mention browsers from other companies … like Google’s Chrome.  And in spite of IE6 being repeatedly known as insecure.

The other explanation is a lot more likely, that Internet Explorer 6 isn’t the only version of Internet Explorer with this security hole.  Is it possible that Internet Explorer 8 is even vulnerable to this exploit?  Entirely!

In fact a number of countries, including Australia, France, and Germany, have already advised staying away from Microsoft’s web browsers entirely until Internet Explorer can be proven secure against these attacks.

It’s not a good day to be Microsoft.

So if you use Internet Explorer, whatever version, it is highly suggested that you follow their example and do the same until Microsoft can assure customers that its browser is safe from these hacks.  Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Apple Safari, they’re all good alternatives.