Be very carefull of IE, suggest doing 3 finger salutes and pulling up task mgr to kill processes you didn't start (or are not normal processes), especially if you are going to use a name/password on something like your bank site, CC site, bill pay or any online purchases where info like SSN / CC number etc.. would be used.
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The government's chief computer-security group is urging users of Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Internet Explorer Web browser to replace it with something less prone to hacker attacks.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team - the body chiefly responsible for defending against online threats - suggests using an alternative to IE because of the browser's many "significant vulnerabilities," according to a report listed on the group's Web site.
Internet Explorer, which has about 95 percent of the browser market, has been plagued with flaws that let hackers access personal information from users' computers.
As if to underscore US-CERT's point, a new claim made by a Dutch computer researcher this week challenges the effectiveness of a downloadable repair Microsoft issued Friday to patch IE holes discovered in June.
One of those holes allowed attackers to trigger pop-up ads prompting Web surfers to visit Web sites that made their computers vulnerable to malicious programs.
Also in June, computer consultants warned their clients that a security flaw fixed in older versions of IE had resurfaced in newer versions. Yet another problem allowed hackers to read keystrokes of people visiting about 50 overseas banking Web sites and Citibank in this country.
Currently, the industry trade journal internetnews.com is reporting that at least one "extremely critical" bug continues to vex IE and that a repair isn't yet available from Microsoft. The problem lets hackers load spyware remotely onto computers without the user's knowledge.
Without that patch in place, IE users risk compromising their own computer's security each time they go online.
"It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites," US-CERT's vulnerability report states.
Alternatives:
The formerly dominant Netscape, now appearing in version 7.1 (
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp).
Opera 7.52 (
http://www.opera.com).
Mozilla 1.7 and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 (both available at
http://www.mozilla.org).MSFT has a blerb for folks who don't want to switch browsers at:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/settings.mspx 
