Microsoft has issued a "critical" ....

[glad rag]

.....warning over a newly-discovered flaw in Windows.

The bug potentially affects every user of the Internet Explorer web browser - around 900 million people worldwide.............bla, bla..

BBC News - Microsoft warning over browser security flaw

[mixture]

Yawn, boring.....

If everyone posted about here about every single advisory Microsoft issue, you would be unable to see any other topics here !

Same old story :
- Keep your AV up to date
- Keep your patches up to date
- Practise basic safe computing (e.g. NOT running as Administrator, not visiting dodgy sites, not using torrents, not opening attachements you are not expecting even from people you know, not inserting unknown origin USB sticks into your machine etc. etc. etc. etc.)

and you'll be safe in 99.99999999999% of cases.

[vulcanised]

I expect the reason the OP posted is that the BBC have made quite a headline feature of this one.

[Slasher]

NOT running as Administrator, not visiting dodgy sites, not using torrents....

I do all three. Never been a problem as long as my AV,
Peerblock and Spywareblaster are updated and running.

Not necessarily makes one fully bulletproof as I recently got
clobbered by opening an attachment (trojan keylogger) from
someone I trusted but that was my own dumb silly fault.

[Tinstaafl]

How to prevent Windows malware: Use Linux.

[Booglebox]

I've been using Windows NT6 (Vista and 7) with nothing but the free and excellent Microsoft Security Essentials and the included Windows Firewall for years, with zero problems. (XP is a different story and should be dead by now)

The key IMHO is to NOT use Internet Explorer if you can avoid it. Chrome and Firefox have their security holes, but they are inherently much, much more secure so it's far less of a real-world issue, and you can have things like adblock and NoScript (blocks javascript unless you allow it) that render you virtually bulletproof.

[mixture]

but they are inherently much, much more secure so it's far less of a real-world issue,

Yeah, but there's still nothing stopping you being a muppet and downloading something from a dodgy site that contains malware.

Similarly there is nothing stopping you being targeted via third party plugins you may run in the aforementioned browsers.

[Booglebox]

True. The problem is often behind the screen

[vulcanised]

aka The nut on the end of the keyboard.