US government advises to stop using Internet Explorer

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the US Department of Homeland Security advices internet users to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The organisation recommends to use an alternative browser. The recommendation follows after Microsoft issued a security bulletin yesterday about a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 to 11.

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On its website US-CERT states, "US-CERT is aware of active exploitation of a use-after-free vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer. This vulnerability affects IE versions 6 through 11 and could lead to the complete compromise of an affected system.  US-CERT recommends that users and administrators enable Microsoft EMET where possible and consider employing an alternative web browser until an official update is available. "

The mentioned EMET is Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit,  an utility the company offers for free which should help prevent vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited. EMET achieves this goal by using security mitigation technologies.

These technologies function as special protections and obstacles that an exploit author must defeat to exploit software vulnerabilities. These security mitigation technologies do not guarantee that vulnerabilities cannot be exploited. However, they work to make exploitation as difficult as possible to perform.

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Microsoft is also working on a patch that should fix the vulnerability, the company has not disclosed any release date.

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