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Internet Explorer users may have a reason to jump ship and head over to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or any other browser. It was recently revealed that there may be a large Zero-day exploit causing problems for IE users. If an Internet Explorer user visits a malicious site that exploits this security hole, the results could be quite bad for them. This issue will not cause a problem for users of Internet Explorer 10. Only users running IE version 7,8, or 9 on a machine running Windows XP, Vista or 7 are at risk.

Essentially, with this Zero-day exploit an outside party could gain control over the infected machine and have the same privileges and access as the current user.

In a statement to Mashable, Yunsun Wee, director of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing said “We’re aware of targeted attacks potentially affecting some versions of Internet Explorer. We have confirmed that Internet Explorer 10 is not affected by this issue.” He also said that Microsoft “will continue to investigate this issue and take further actions as appropriate.”

The best advice we can offer at this time is to switch to another browser, or if you really love Internet Explorer, upgrade to version 10, which is not vulnerable to this attack. Granting a malicious individual the same access as you have to your personal computer could lead to them gaining access to important and private information. I don’t think we need to tell you how bad that could be.

Source: Mashable

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