After IE attacks, Microsoft eyes security betas

With hackers actively exploiting an unpatched bug in Internet Explorer (IE), and some users unhappy that a fix for the problem may still be two weeks away, Microsoft says it is looking at ways of providing more rapid security updates.

Hackers began circulating code that exploited this newest IE vulnerability late last week, and to date it has been used on several hundred maliciously encoded Web sites, according to security vendor Websense.

With Microsoft on track to patch the problem on April 11, some in the security community are saying that the software giant is too slow to respond to serious threats.

Microsoft's practice of holding security fixes until the second Tuesday of each month, called "Patch Tuesday" by administrators, can sometimes hurt home users because they may not have the benefit of the "layers and layers" of protection that are typical in corporate environments, said Todd Towles, [cq] a security consultant based in Austin, Texas.