While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser has seen its market share dip in recent years no thanks to the rise of other browsers such as Google’s Chrome, this does not mean that it has become insignificant. No sir, it still happens to be one of the world’s most used web browsers, at least according to the folks over at Net Applications. Such popularity also translates to another issue – if a hacker wants to fool around with your system through a browser, what better way to do so than by targeting Internet Explorer? Apparently, a zero-day exploit discovered in the Internet Explorer 8 browser a good seven months back has yet to be patched.
This particular security hole was revealed to the masses by the Zero-Day Initiative, where it has been touted that this particular flaw will enable hackers “to execute arbitrary code” within the browser itself should the user end up surfing to an infected website, or perhaps fall for the age old trick of opening up a file that has been specially designed to take advantage of this particular exploit. Hopefully the folks over at Microsoft will be able to fix this exploit soon, considering how Internet Explorer 8 sees action by approximately 21% of web browser users around the globe.
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