Another critical IE flaw

I should mention a fairly big Windows vulnerability (which involves active scripting). Apparently there are proof-of-concept exploits circulating that do innocent things like open up the calculator. Unfortunately, once exploits are out that can do this, it's trivial for them to do worse. The bottom line is, be careful what sites you visit, beware of "driveby downloads" using this tactic consider alternative browsers until you're patched. (Although in reality, with IE's integration in Windows, it's hard to be completely safe this way with other apps using IE to view html objects....)

The best advice at this point seems to be to disable active scripting. If you're running a fully patched IE 6, you're vulnerable to this attack. However the most recent "refresh" of the IE 7 beta is not vulnerable (Beta 2 of IE 7 is, but if you've got the more recent refresh you should be safe.)

Sans is going to Yellow to raise awareness of the bug and active exploits. There is a nother bug that's been recently discovered as well, at this point the other bug appears to be more of a nuisance "cause Explorer to crash when visiting a site" bug, however, clever people sometimes find ways to make nuisance bugs slightly more important.

Secunia Advisory is here. Microsoft Incident Response blog here.

A quick google turned up a few guides to disabling active scripting.... one such is here.