The Security Mentor

Bad guys are taking advantage of the bug(s) now to plant nasty software on the computers of people who visit the wrong web site. Microsoft says there have been only "limited" attacks. The Washington Post's Brian Krebs says that as many as 200 previously safe and legitimate web sites have been taken over by bad guys who then use the web sites to attack the web sites's visitors.

My usual advice to avoid sleazy web sites therefore doesn't help much. Firewalls are irrelevant to this problem, and antivirus might help but doesn't seem to have caught up yet.

If you're stuck at a company standardized on Internet Explorer, I'd suggest only using it to visit company internal sites. You could try turning off "Active Scripting" and then using the security zones feature to re-enable it for sites that require it, but really it's not worth the effort. Switch to Firefox or Opera. The switch can even be fun and is certainly less painful than trying to fix a computer wrecked by a security problem.