There’s a new zero-day vulnerability in many of the current versions of Internet Explorer and is being used in active attacks right now. The exploit that’s in use has the ability to bypass both DEP and ASLR and researchers say it’s being used by a known APT group.

Microsoft has issued an advisory (2963983) about the CVE-2014-1776 IE vulnerability, and said it is aware of some targeted attacks using the exploit. The vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated. The vulnerability may corrupt memory in a way that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user within Internet Explorer. An attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website

Microsoft has said that a patch will be available next patch Tuesday (May 13, 2014). In the meantime other methods can be used to protect your self from the zero-day exploit.

1. Download and install its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a free tool that can help beef up security on Windows

2. You can also run IE in a more secure mode by going to Internet Option s> Security and setting the slider to High and/or Disable Active Scripting

3. Use Chrome or Firefox for surfing the web.

4. If using IE10 or higher enable Enhanced Protected Mode