I don’t know how many of you use Internet Explorer or visit sites like MySpace or FaceBook and use their plugins. Myself I do not have anything on those sites and never use Internet Explorer for anything other than checking a web page to make sure it displays properly in IE and Firefox (my choice of browser).
According to the Washington Post‘s Security Fix blog, cyber criminals are populating the Internet with Web sites designed to exploit several recently-discovered security holes in a half-dozen widely used ActiveX plug-ins for IE 6 and 7, most notably the one offered by Facebook and MySpace to help users upload photos. The sites, advertised via links in email and instant message spam, also ‘probe for other vulnerable IE plug-ins, including two recently discovered from Yahoo! and one for QuickTime (this one attacks a vulnerability Apple patched just last month). The sites also throw in an exploit against a six-month-old IE flaw.’
If you use any of those plugins for IE you really need to deactivate the plug-ins with a GUI tool that?SANS Internet Storm Center has released. Actually my advise would be to dump Internet Explorer all together and down load a copy of Firefox. Once you go to it you will never want to use IE again. I have been a user of it since before it ever got its name and love it.