On January 12, Google took offense at Chinese hackers, and on January 14 it became known that it and 30 other large companies had been hacked using a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. A few more days passed, and the German and French governments recommended that citizens switch to alternative browsers.

The new statements must be distinguished from the European Commission's antitrust decisions, according to which Windows users in Europe will be able to choose from a variety of browsers upon installation. This measure will make Microsoft's monopoly position on the European browser market less monopolistic.

This time we are talking about protection against a serious vulnerability, which in IT security bulletins has the long name CVE-2010-0249. It lies in the fact that an attacker, having organized an attack in a special way, will be able to intercept a pointer to a certain memory area and execute malicious code with its help.

What follows is trivial. Using a special system, an infected computer can be controlled from control servers. Presumably, hackers used such machines to access the mailboxes of Chinese human rights activists.

Apparently, hackers broke into the intranets of Google and other companies by exploiting a hole in Internet Explorer 6. This is an older version of the browser that is now used less and less. This type of hack could only be performed on Windows 2000 or Windows XP - other OS versions come with newer browsers. The rage at Google, whose corporate browser is Chrome, is understandable.

Europeans have a good choice of alternatives - for example, you can replace Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox, whose market share exceeds 25 percent. There are also Opera, Safari, Chrome - all of them are more or less common and support web standards in any case better than Internet Explorer 6.

Microsoft, of course, is not happy with this advisory rejection of Internet Explorer. Therefore, company representatives urge not to change the browser, but simply upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, which is much better in many respects (and this is the honest truth). However, there are subtleties in this conflict of interest that you may not immediately notice.

First of all, Microsoft is not saying enough. The vulnerability is characteristic not only of Internet Explorer 6, but also 7 and 8. Another thing is that virus and Trojan fighters have not yet been able to catch malicious code for these browsers. In addition, in the case of the eighth version, in order to become infected, you need to create real sabotage in the security settings.

Secondly, officials are not saying enough. There are not many computers with Internet Explorer 6 (and therefore Windows XP) installed. These are mainly netbooks and corporate machines, where the conservatism of system administrators and already implemented solutions do not allow updating operating systems and browsers at will.

Thus, the call to replace old browsers with new ones, with alternative ones and with any others is quite populist. You have to try very hard to find Internet Explorer 6 among ordinary users.

If we imagine this topic in the form of a cube, then debates about browsers, security, the Chinese question, freedom of speech and the ubiquitous hackers will occupy only five sides. The sixth, most important, was named by McAfee.

According to its experts, the discovered vulnerability is a key moment in the history of cybersecurity. Indeed, dozens of gaps, shortcomings, errors, vulnerabilities, shortcomings, failures, patterns of incorrect behavior and implementation of web standards are found in any browser. But until now, none of them have caused such a stir in the media and have not made it to the front page. This is, as McAfee says, the largest and most sophisticated cyber attack in recent years.

Well, and the biggest crusade against Internet Explorer.

Throw away the crap Authorities in Germany and France advised citizens to give up Internet Explorer