Aussie computer security experts have hit out at the French and German governments for “jumping the gun” in advising the great unwashed to ditch Internet Explorer.

The Germany's Federal Office for Information Security and France's Government-owned Certa cyber threat agency, said all versions of IE were vulnerable to attack and people should switch to Firefox or Google's Chrome. The code needed to exploit the hole was published online over the weekend, leading to fears that regular consumers could be at risk of having their computers attacked.

But Australia's computer emergency response team, AusCERT says the threat has been hyped out of existence. Although Microsoft has yet to issue a patch to fix the issue, AusCERT has published work arounds.

AusCERT senior information security analyst Zane Jarvis said that the workaround will not remove the problem it just stops the exploit from working properly. "IE 6, 7 and 8 are all vulnerable to the exploit but those customers running IE8 have built-in protections, which is called data execution prevention, and it's also on by default in Vista Service Pack 1 and later."