Secunia on the ball with Zero Day IE7 alert
Well folks, after a long wait Internet Explorer 7 has arrived. The final release happened today and everyone has been blogging about it. The verdict is already mixed across the blogosphere and the news that the excellent Secunia have verifired a zero day vulnerability will not help persuade people to switch. Secunia has verified an MHTML related vulnerability that, though low impact, is a disappointing start.
Description:
A vulnerability has been discovered in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information.
The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of redirections for URLs with the "mhtml:" URI handler. This can be exploited to access documents served from another web site.
Secunia has constructed a test, which is available at:
http://secunia.com/Internet_Explorer_Arbitrary_Content_Disclosure_Vulnerability_Test/
Some of the opinions I've read today express concern about switching back to IE from their beloved Firefox incarnation because it will not stand up to Firefox on funcionality (if you've got a plethora of FF plug-ins installed!). I'd encourage people to give it a go and find out as Microsoft seem to have got things properly covered for a change.
Any functionality they haven't taken from Firefox and Opera (tabbed browsing, feed reader etc) in the new base product could already be done via an add-on, and you might just find it at the IE Add-Ons site!
From another angle, some including Tom Raftery have expressed concerns that moving to IE7 will be a support nightmare. I think Microsoft have done sufficient release prep work to minimise this, providing enough information to the average user for a change so they can plan their upgrade properly.
With post-upgrade IE7 checklists for various levels of user and thorough Release Notes to check for potential application compatability issues etc before you ever run that setup.exe, there should be reduced amounts of tears and hair puling ;-)
technorati tags:Internet, Explorer, IE7, Release, Firefox, Secunia, Alerts,
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