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29 Jan 2010
The fallout from the Chinese hack on Google's systems continued today, after the Department of Health (DoH) released an urgent bulletin advising all NHS Trusts using Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade their browser.
Microsoft admitted a fortnight ago that a critical flaw in Internet Explorer had been the route by which Chinese hackers sought to infiltrate Google's corporate systems, a flaw that it later admitted to knowing about for months.
Microsoft has since issued an out-of-band patch for the problem, which can allow remote code execution on affected systems. But the company is recommending users to upgrade to IE8, which has security measures which will make the exploit code difficult to implement effectively.
The DoH Informatics Directorate has now issued its own guidance for NHS Trusts, urging them to implement the fix as soon as possible. The bulletin also recommended that "organisations still using IE6 on the affected platforms upgrade to IE7".
"IE7 has been warranted to work correctly with NHS Spine applications such as CSA, and provides additional security features over IE6," the directive added.
The DoH has provided no further information, and is presumably not recommending an upgrade to the newest version of Microsoft's browser, IE8, because of support issues with these key applications.
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Do you agree?
This just aint going to work!
Given the large number of apps accross the NHS (not all areas of the NHS use SPINE. Scotland, wales and NI for instance!) that are not compatible with IE7+ this just aint going to work. I spent 2 years trying to convince some of the biggest NHS organisations in the country to upgrade to IE7 but the DOH teams were still sending out updates to systems that were that outdated they were still hard coded to use a A: floppy drive. Many NHS organisations still use NT4 because they have stable platforms to run oncology systems. The NHS has bigger IT security issues than what version of IE they are using.
Posted by: Bob 01 Feb 2010
Firefox is safe and very useful with all its extensions
"Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded? 24,689,112 times since January 21, 2010" - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/
Posted by: Paul 30 Jan 2010