The web browser used by 69 percent of users all over the world continues to be at the mercy of hackers who managed to profit from a critical unpatched vulnerability affecting the more widely used IE7, but also E5.01, IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta 2. The alarm bells have been tolling since Saturday, when Microsoft warned about the “huge increase” of attacks getting through because of this security flaw.

The first of these hacking raids had been spotted on Chinese servers and they seem to have been happening for more than a week. According to Computer World, on Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center blog, researchers Tareq Saade and Ziv Mador warned about the attacks spreading to legitimate sites as well. For instance, the unfortunate users who access a certain popular Taiwanese search engine or a pornography site based in Hong Kong became digital sitting ducks.

Users don’t even have to click on certain suspect links or download software no one heard about; all it takes is opening an infected page and IE will quit unexpectedly, and then restart. Only now, your eyes will not be the only ones to be looking at what you’re accessing and the information you’re inputting. Fortunately, the only things to have been stolen from users are game passwords. For now. It’s only a matter of time until more valuable information of personal or administrative nature will fall into the wrong hands as more and more serious sites are illegally turned into traps for net surfers using Internet Explorer.

Microsoft did say it was working on a patch to solve this unacceptable situation, without mentioning when it will be ready. The next security update is scheduled on January 9, 2009; hopefully, they’ll come up with something much sooner.

Till they do, all users can do is switch to other web browsers out there, or, if they’re loyal IE fans, they’ll follow Microsoft’s recommendations on how to work around the problem, like tinkering with the Windows registry and other things the Average Joe normally finds too much of a technical bother.