British government backs Internet Explorer but version 6 under fire
A British government minister has rejected calls for a widespread review into whether officials should use Internet Explorer. But individual departments are split over whether version 6 should still be used in 2010.
Asked by Lord Avebury whether the security flaw which assisted recent attacks on Google in China meant it was time to review official use of Internet Explorer, Lord West replied that, “Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that moving from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure.”
He added that government computers were protected by additional security measures not available to most home users. That’s a similar argument put forward by officials after the revelation that the Ministry of Defence was still using Internet Explorer version 6, the version most seriously affected by the recent bug as it didn’t have extra security steps of later editions.
(There has been speculation that at least some government officials still on version 6 are doing so as they are still running Windows 2000, which raises some questions in itself.)
Lord West noted that although a single government agency issues advice on the subject, individual departments are responsible for their own cybersecurity policies. That’s clear from the fact that the Department of Health has now asked all NHS trusts (the organizations which oversee publicly funded medical services on a local basis) to switch to at least version 7.
The inconsistencies in the British government’s policies are in stark contrast to some of its continental counterparts. Both France and Germany recently issued public warnings that all computer users should avoid all versions of Internet Explorer altogether until Microsoft had patched the security flaw (which has now happened).
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