The Security Mentor

If you view the wrong web content in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can lose control of your computer. It used to be that you only ran into malicious content like that at, um, questionable web sites.

Sunday, the news broke that banner ads from more than one advertising company have been taking advantage of the Internet Explorer bugs to install unwanted software on people's computers. So far the unwanted software has simply displayed more advertising but there's nothing to stop something worse from happening. In fact, according to author Conrad Longmore, banner ads have dropped some truly nasty software onto victims's machines.

Here are some things you can do that partially help:

• Update your antivirus software. It may stop bad things from installing themselves.


• Upgrade to XP Service Pack 2. So far the attacks haven't used the known bugs in SP2, and SP2 does protect against the things the toxic ads try to do.


• Turn off "Active Scripting" in the "Internet Zone". This only stops some of the problems and interferes with the workings of some useful web sites. Go to Tools/Internet Options/Security/Internet/Custom Level/Scripting/Active Scripting/Disable.


• Use some kind of reputable ad-blocking software.

There's also a complete solution:

• Stop using Internet Explorer.