The security expert Matan Gillon published information about a proof-of-concept vulnerability that he discovered while running both the Internet Explorer browser and the Google Desktop search application.

The main culprit here is, big surprise, Internet Explorer and its faulty implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which allows a website to inject code into a page which enables it to execute on a remote machine. The infamous Internet Explorer 6 and Google Desktop duo proves to be a killer combination for any vulnerable system.

All a hacker needs to do in order to make sure his attack will strike the desired target is attract a user to a malicious web page. "Thousands of web sites can be exploited and there isn't a simple solution against this attack at least until IE is fixed. That means millions of IE users are affected by this design flaw," says Gillon.

Since competing Microsoft browsers like Opera and Firefox aren't vulnerable to this security breach, switching applications, in case you haven't done so before, is a good solution. Obviously, we can't just overlook the superficial code writing done by Google programmers who failed to take the integrity of your personal data seriously.