HCA: Hermit Crab Association

A watchdog group called Fire-Eye has just announced that they have discovered a new exploit targeting a critical vulnerability in IE versions 6-11 and the US government is warning IE users to switch to either Google or Fire Fox due to the nature of the exploit used.A group of hackers have been systematically targeting IE users over the last few weeks and Microsoft wasn't aware of the security breach until just very recently according to the Associated Press.This coming on the heels of Windows XP being shut down and no longer receiving support service from Microsoft which has prompted the thirty million XP users to begin switching to more recent Operating systems like Windows 7 and 8, Microsoft announced that a patch for the security flaw should be released in the next few days but until then they are asking IE users to switch to a different browser.To break things down IE is actually built into the operating system which is a huge security issue in and of itself as anyone who gains control of the browser has direct access to your Operating system or OS, your BIOS registry(this is necessary for the computer to start up it contains all the lines of code which allows the computer to work), your Active-X controls(this is a list of control commands which is often targeted by viruses, exploits and malware because it is a sure way of locking you out of the computer thus allowing the attacker to install more executable files(exe.)that contain more malicious code thereby infecting your system further, these exe. files are often tied to HKCU:Run entries which are written into your start up list that cause the virus/exploit/malware to startup with the computer which makes removal of the initial infection and the subsequent infections very difficult to say the least.You combine the fact that IE is just a shortcut to your OS and so forth with the fact that these guys are targeting Internet Explorers built in flash player to install their exploit kit.Basically the flash player is using old code from a very old version of IE which was patched with a faulty patch which allows the attacker remote control of your machine just by browsing to an effected site and because of this its completely vulnerable to certain types of attack and these guys have developed an exploit kit that takes advantage of this vulnerability because it literally gives them access to your computer.You can stop this by using programs like Malware Bytes Anti Exploit(I have it and it works like a charm), Microsoft also has a free tool called EMET or Enhanced Mitigation Experience tool you need the latest version for it to work, IE 10-11 users can also block this exploit by using the enhanced protection mode.I myself don't use IE and I was able to persuade my parents into ditching it some time ago, I use Fire Fox and they use Google Chrome, I have been preaching against IE for years now because of the way that it is designed Microsoft recycles code from old versions when they release new ones which really aren't new if you think about it which causes IE to have a lot of problems that it shouldn't have...

We have had trouble with internet explorer for years, we have used Google, msn, Yahoo at work. Depending what computer your at.

@Laurie, IE has always been full of issues since I started using it way back in the late nineties. We've had two desktop computers and our laptop get severe infections from using IE because it is so insecure and is a security breach in and of itself.The first desktop got over a thousand infections at the same time from using IE because of an improperly patched remote assistance plug-in which basically allowed the attacker to pretend to be a Microsoft(MS) Remote Assistant(this is an actual job done by MS employees who are their to help you in-case you can't get logged into something or if your computer is compromised they can remotely scan it and remove the viruses.Being that the fake Remote Assistant has all of the same rights and privileges to your computer they can install whatever they like be it viruses/spyware/malware/back door access points or root kits/key stroke loggers and so forth which is what happened to our first desktop.It was so badly and deeply infected that Norton couldn't clean up all of the threats and the hard drive had a critical failure several days later due to much data being deleted or corrupted.We eventually borrowed a spare desktop from a friend and that one ended up getting infected much the same way because my dad in-particular would open any email that he got and boom he got the computer infected with several dozen viruses and then tried to blame it on us kids.We'd switched from Norton to Mcafee since it seemed to be worse than useless at protecting the computer but Mcafee was an even worse anti-virus it never even gave a notification that we'd been infected and never would find the infections even with a full scan so that computer got trashed because it got to the point that we couldn't even boot it up without getting the blue screen of death or BSOD which is big warning that the computer is dieing.Several years later we get the laptop we have now only to have it infected because dad obviously still hadn't learned his lesson because he was still opening every email he got which ended with us having to take the computer to get it fixed because it was completely locked down.We've been infected two additional times due to poor security patches on MS's end so now I use four programs to stop infections before they happen.Malware-Bytes Anti-Malware, Malware-Bytes Anti-Exploit, Microsoft Securities Essential anti-virus/malware and Spyware Blaster by Brightfort.LLC.All of the above mentioned programs are free and very powerful plus they play well with each other.lol