SANS ISC: Microsoft & IE support plans, best be on IE11 by 01/2016 - SANS Internet Storm Center

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SANS ISC InfoSec Forums

Microsoft announced in their blog on the 8th (thanks Allan for the heads up) that starting January 2016 the browsers that will be supported are: 

• Vista SP2 - IE9
• 2008 SP2 - IE9 
• Windows 7 - IE11
• 2008 R2 SP1 - IE11
• Windows 8.1 - IE11
• 2012 - IE10
• 2012 R2 - IE11

â??I can hear the security brain cells cheer and the business brain cells cringe.  From a security perspective running the latest browser typically makes sense.  However from a business perspective this may cause quite a few issues in many organisations.  Older applications were often written for specific browser versions, so to upgrade or allow for those to continue to function may not be a trivial task.  The blog does explain that you may be able to use "Enterprise mode" in IE11.  This might be one way to migrate for your organisation (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/04/02/stay-up-to-date-with-enterprise-mode-for-internet-explorer-11.aspx)  

The blog entry also has what I'd like to call a few interesting throwaway lines.  For example "After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates." In other words you may have to migrate to IE12 when it becomes available for the OS you use.  

In short if you are not using the latest Internet Explorer in your organisation you may have limited time to get it sorted before your risk profile increases dramatically, unless of course all the bad guys promise to only concentrate on current versions of the browser. 

MS Blog can be found here --> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx

Cheers

Mark H