New Microsoft IE Vulnerability

On Monday, Microsoft published a security advisory to announce a new vulnerability that can allow remote code execution in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 on several different platforms. IE 8 and the protected-mode of IE 7 are not affected, and the current recommendation is to upgrade affected browsers to one of these (as there currently is no patch available for the exploit code).
I was pleased to see that my favorite SaaS web security/web filtering offering (Zscaler) was fast (or first) to fix the vulnerability. Their clients are protected without any action on their part.
Nice…and it reinforces the entire notion of outsourcing certain functions to qualified third parties.

More info:

Information Week

Daily Mirror

SaaS Web Security News

Cisco announced the other day their intent to acquire ScanSafe:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/corp_102709.html

ScanSafe was sold by Google, Verizon, Sprint and a host of others, and was generally regarded as a good in-the-cloud web filtering service for small businesses. Over the past year or two, I’ve heard some reports of their inability to perform in larger enterprises.

If this Cisco announcement doesn’t validate the space, I don’t know what would. For now, I still like the Zscaler offering for the large enterprise, and expect that Websense will have a stronger offering soon for large companies with their hosted offering. Purewire (acquired by Barricuda) and Secure Computing (now part of McAfee) I don’t know enough about, but seem a bit behind Zscaler in ability to scale.
Let me know your thoughts.