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Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE

Posted by timothy on from the you-saw-this-coming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. What if IE could be uninstalled? by davet2001 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Since I never use IE and never intend to, it's a shame that there's no uninstall option in XP.

    Removing IE would save me bandwidth on all the patches and more importantly spare me the forced reboots.

    I'd probably find that a lot of rendered local text would stop working without IE such as help pages, but I usually find google more effective than built in help these days any way.

    1. Re:What if IE could be uninstalled? by WraithCube · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Troll? I know the parent missed the point of the GP that the operating system should not depend on an html rendering engine of a buggy browser, but is quite far from a troll. He brings up a good point. There are a lot of apps that for right or wrong use the IE rendering engine, including plenty of in house applications.

      As far as removing IE goes, iexplorer.exe will get rid of the gui leaving just the engine behind it. However, removing an html rendering engine should not break an operating system. Years ago I mistakenly tried to forcibly remove the rest of the engine from windows xp and ended up with more errors and problems than I could figure out. It breaks windows explorer and if I remember correctly causes internet connection problems since connection properties are configured through IE.

      Though I would have to call into question how much any modern OS depends on an HTML renderer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both KDE and GNOME would be able to operate with only minor lost functionality without an html rendering engine. I know khelp uses an html library (that oddly is not installed in opensuse by default). GTK+ and QT can both use webkit, but are in no way dependent on it.

  2. Re:Just a thought. by phantomcircuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And honestly, so far the chinese have struck me as the competent types.

    The several thousand failed attack attempts in my logs would care to disagree.