German Government Advises Public To Stop Using IE

An anonymous reader writes "After McAfee's disclosure of an IE 0-day vulnerability this week that had been used in Operation Aurora, the hack and stealing of data from Google, Adobe and about 3 dozen other major companies, the German government has advised the public to switch to alternative browsers (untranslated statement). Given that the exploit has now been made public and the patch from Microsoft is still nowhere to be seen, how long will it be before other governments follow suit?"

Comments

Yeah sure

[SmallFurryCreature]

It could happen to any browser to have the same security flaw in 3 different versions DESPITE claimed complete rewrites of the code.

MS apologists, you got to admire their dedication. The Iraqi minister of information used windows as well.

Re:Yeah sure

[Maxo-Texas]

He's probably thinking of articles like this:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/541-mshtml-layout-engine-completely-rewritten-for-internet-explorer-8.html

Interesting article here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

"[netscape killed themselves by rewriting]
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."

Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".

Re:To be fair to Microsoft

[sakdoctor]

Why be fair to Microsoft in this case? Bashing where bashing is due;
IE is a highly dangerous lump of toxic/radioactive waste, with a half life of over 20 years.

Microsoft did everything wrong. Wrote the piece of shit in the first place. Tightly integrated it into windows, for leveraging purposes. Didn't even try to keep on top of updates letting it stagnate.
It will have a damaging effect on the web, web standards, and general computing, long after Microsoft drops support for any given version.

It's not the "government"

[kill-1]

It's a German federal agency, not the German government. And they warn users about IE every time there is a major unpatched security hole.

Re:To be fair to Microsoft

[McGiraf]

"Wrote the piece of shit in the first place"

No, they bought/stole the Microsoft way from Spyglass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

(the link ends with a dot slashdot moves it after "[wikipedia.org]". bug! )

Not the German Government

[prefec2]

The "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik" (BSI), engl. Federal Bureau for Security in Information Technology, is not a governmental, but a state institution. It is not strictly driven by the government. And it is controlled by the parliament. Even though it works in the domain of the ministry of the interior. So no minister was involved in the "do not use IE" speech.

BTW: IE has not the biggest market share in Germany.

Re:A stinging lesson

[CyclistOne]

This happened to a friend of mine. His system was totally hijacked. Couldn't run any .exe. I finally got into the registry and disabled the malware, and things were seemingly back to normal. But we re-imaged the machine and restored his backed-up data. It was a pain, but it didn't take that long. But it was a similar thing, I think. Firefox crashing - go try IE, and bang.

Re:Before anyone starts throwing stones...

[ilguido]

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.x: unpatched 0 of 6 Secunia advisories.

MS Internet Explorer 8.x: unpatched 4 of 8 Secunia advisories.

MS Internet Explorer 7.x: unpatched 11 of 42 Secunia advisories.

Opera 10.x: unpatched 0 of 3 Secunia advisories.

I can't see your point, are you trolling?