Symantec leads Internet Explorer fight back

In response to the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer Zero Day vulnerability, Symantec has provided a script to mitigate against the attacks, posting the tool on its blog for people to download.

"Microsoft is working on a patch, but it won’t be made available for XP users so the Symantec tool offers a workaround for those users," says an official release from the security experts.

"All versions of IE on all platforms are affected and users can be exploited by browsing to maliciously crafted web pages.

"It's being used in targeted attacks which either means a malicious link is being sent in spear phishing emails or they’re setting up watering hole sites."

In order to mitigate Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerability, Symantec is providing the following recommendations.

Microsoft states that versions of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 4.1 and above can mitigate this vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The toolkit is available for Windows XP users as well.

If using EMET is not an option, users can consider mitigating the issue by unregistering a DLL file named VGX.DLL. This file provides support for VML (Vector Markup Language) in the browser. This is not required by the majority of users.

However, by unregistering the library, any application that uses the DLL may no longer function properly. Also, some applications installed on the system may potentially re-register the DLL.

With this in mind, the following one line of instruction can be executed to make the system immune from attacks attempting to exploit the vulnerability. This line of instruction can be used for all affected operating systems:

"%SystemRoot%\System32\regsvr32.exe" -u "%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\VGX\vgx.dll"

We have developed a batch file that can be used to perform the task for those who may be required to administrate large IT infrastructures.

For more information visit the Symantec security blog by clicking here