Protect Yourself from the Latest Internet Explorer Security Hole

As with most IE security holes, if you’re running Windows 7 or Vista, you should enable Protected Mode, which runs Internet Explorer in something similar to a sandbox basically it protects you from malicious web pages a little more though not completely. Just head into the Internet Options Security tab, and click the checkbox. If you just drag the slider in the screenshot above to High, you’ll have disabled ActiveX Controls from automatically running.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that you’ll be prompted more often when visiting sites that use ActiveX Controls. Microsoft recommends that you add sites that you really trust to your Trusted Sites list… you will probably have to uncheck that Require https checkbox at the bottom though. To add a site to your Trusted Sites, click the Trusted Sites icon shown in the image above, and then click the Sites button, type in the website URL, and click the Add buttons. Clearly trust is a hard thing to earn. Open up Tools Manage Add-ons from your IE menu, and then change the drop-down for show to say All add-ons. This will then show you a list of all the current add-ons that are enabled, so we can start disabling stuff.

At this point you’ll have a massive list of add-ons, and you can start disabling them by clicking on them, and then clicking Disable. Important to note: Adobe Reader seems to have one security hole after another, and if you don’t really need Java you should get rid of it. My general principle is to disable everything I don’t need (or just everything), and then only enable add-ons if I really need them. Bonus: Disabling add-ons is the quickest way to make IE run much faster.

One of the best things that Microsoft has come out with in the recent past is the “Fix it” feature on their support site—for many problems, you can simply launch a Microsoft-created utility that will solve your problem right there.

By default, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows Mail open HTML e-mail messages in the Restricted sites zone. The Restricted sites zone helps mitigate attacks that could try to exploit this vulnerability by preventing Active Scripting and ActiveX controls from being used when reading HTML e-mail messages. However, if a user clicks a link in an e-mail message, the user could still be vulnerable to exploitation of this vulnerability through the Web-based attack scenario.