Confirming a security flaw affecting Internet Explorer, tech giant Microsoft reportedly said that it is working on a fix. Internet Explorer is reportedly being used by hackers right now.
The vulnerability was first reported by the US Homeland Security on Friday evening, although the issue is not limited to American devices. It was found in how Internet Explorer handles memory. An attacker could use the flaw to remotely run malicious code on an affected computer, such as tricking a user into opening a malicious website from a search query or a link sent by email.
The tech giant reportedly assigned the bug with a common vulnerability identifier, CVE-2020-0674, but specific details of the bug have yet to be released.
Qihoo 360, a China-based security research team, helped Microsoft in finding this flaw and it is believed to be a similar vulnerability as one disclosed by Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser.
As per reports, neither Qihoo, Microsoft, nor Mozilla said how attackers were exploiting the bug, who the attackers were, or who was being targeted.
According to information gathered by PreciseSecurity.com, Microsoft Office products were the most commonly exploited by cybercriminals around the world and nearly 73 per cent of cyber exploits were performed in MS Office products in the third quarter of 2019. MS Office products were followed by Browsers with 13.47 per cent of the total number of exploits by cybercriminals, Android with 9.09 per cent, Java with 2.36 per cent, Adobe Flash with 1.57 per cent and PDF with 0.66 per cent.
*Edited from an IANS report.