Microsoft released an unscheduled security patch on Friday designed to fix a trio of serious security problems affecting users of its ubiquitous Internet Explorer Web browser. All three of the security vulnerabilities might be exploited to take control of vulnerable systems, so patching is a necessity.

The flaws involve: an integer overflow involving the way IE processes bitmap files, a memory processing vulnerability in the processing of GIF files and a scripting vulnerability that was the basis of June's Download.Ject (Scob) attack. All three of these vulnerabilities have been reported to be relatively straightforward to exploit.

By John Leyden at The Register.

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