Microsoft have recently warned that there is a critical bug in all versions of Internet Explorer. This bug allows a malicious website to be constructed that enables an attacker to take control of any machine that visits it - assuming that user is logged in as the machine admin. As this is often the default setup of a Windows machine, this places many users at risk.
While there have been workarounds suggested to this issue, our advice would be to use an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox until Microsoft releases a patch for this vulnerability.
However, this news is of particular concern to any users still using Windows XP. As has been widely publicised recently, Windows XP is now out of support. While Microsoft will fix this issue, this fix will never be applied to XP machines. This means this is the first high profile case of what experts have been warning about for some time. Issues like this will now start to stack up, and XP will become increasingly insecure from now on. While this particular issue can be bypassed by using a different browser (and we would certainly suggest that anyone using XP permanently switches to either of the browsers above for this reason), future issues may have no workaround.
If you require more information about migrating away from Windows XP, please contact us.