German government: ‘Don’t use Internet Explorer’

Microsoft has reacted angrily to criticism from the German government, who have advised its citizens to look for an alternative browser to Internet explorer, as the current versions of the software have security holes which could leave them vulnerable to cyber attacks akin to those experienced by several major companies in China this last week.

Redmond rejected the warning, saying that the actual risk to private end-users was extremely low, and they could protect themselves easily by increasing the security settings on the software to ‘High’. They did acknowledge however that this would in fact block a large number of websites and cause some ‘follow-on’ issues.

German government: ‘Don’t use Internet Explorer’

The internet security world has been on high alert since last week when Google, the global internet giant, announced that it had been the target of a high-level cyber attack. Following this event, it transpired that security holes in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer software had been compromised in order to run malicious code on end-user’s computers, which contributed to the attack.

MS generally release security updates for their products once every month, however the publicity surrounding this exploit, coupled with the fact that the method that was used to take advantage of it is now live on the internet, could mean that they will release an ‘out of cycle’ update.