It has been estimated that less than 10% of U.S. computer users run Internet Explorer 6 but 50% of the computers in China use this ancient version of IE which means serious problems for China when it comes to internet security.

Hackers have drawn a very clear target on the computers in China, about half of them, in an effort to initiate an attack through vulnerabilities found in IE6 through hundreds of malicious web sites.

Internet Explorer 6 is about 9 years old as it was a web browser application that was bundled with Windows XP back in the year 2001. Since then, several other versions of Internet Explorer have been developed which include increased security functionality virtually eliminating the vulnerabilities that hackers are taking advantage of in China on PC’s utilizing IE6.

It is clear that Chinese computer users are more likely to fall victim to cyber attacks due to the vulnerabilities within IE6. In the recent events of Google’s corporate networking being attacked, it was discovered that China via exploits within IE6 was the culprit. The attacks were solely aimed at IE6, added Microsoft. Just yesterday, Microsoft took action to patch this bug that allowed hackers to break into Google’s network. Microsoft admitted to knowing about the vulnerability back in August 2009.

Even though a patch has been released to resolve the vulnerability in IE6, Chinese users are more susceptible to running across a site that hosts malicious attack code. Many of the web pages containing malicious code are running on China-based servers and are Chinese-language sites.

The MS10-002 Security Bulletin provides links to the Internet Explorer security update which is also available through the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services.