14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently announced that it would update every single Internet Explorer version on this month’s Patch Tuesday cycle, including the utterly-old IE 6 still installed on a shockingly high number of systems.
The software giant will release a total of five bulletins tomorrow, one of which is rated as critical and is aimed at its in-house browser Internet Explorer. All versions of IE on every single Windows edition are supposed to be patched, so make sure you deploy the update as soon as it’s released.
Security company Sophos warns that even though it’s a relatively small Patch Tuesday, the existing vulnerabilities represent a major threat for almost every Windows user out there.
“Take note, however, that Microsoft's Affected Software chart states that one of the RCEs is a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 10, on platforms from Windows XP right up to Windows 8 and Windows RT,” Sophos explained.
“The other RCE, which isn't rated critical, affects Office. Interestingly, the versions at risk seem to be Office 2003 for Windows, and Office 2011 for Mac, meaning that this isn't just a Windows Patch Tuesday.”
Even though it was released more than 11 years ago, Internet Explorer 6 is currently installed on no less than 6.3 percent of computers worldwide, according to Microsoft’s own statistics.
More than 24 percent of Chinese users are still running it, while the other countries around the world are slowly dumping it for newer browsers. IE6 currently has a market share of 1.7 percent in Russia and Japan, 1.3 percent in South Korea, 1 percent in Vietnam and 0.8 in South Africa.
As far as the United States and Canada are concerned, Internet Explorer 6 is no longer a good choice for browsing the web, so only 0.2 percent of the local users are still running it.