Microsoft late Thursday confirmed a security flaw in its dominant Internet Explorer browser could be potentially exploited by malicious hackers to take "take complete control of the affected system." The software giant released a security advisory acknowledging the vulnerability and recommended that IE users set Internet and local intranet security zone settings to "High" before running ActiveX controls in these zones.
All supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 6.0 in Windows XP SP 2 (Service Pack 2) are affected. Microsoft Corp."s confirmation comes less than 24 hours after private security research firm SEC Consult published a working exploit to show that the bug could crash the browser or exploited to execute arbitrary code in the context of IE.