The flaw is actively exploited on multiple sites, and antivirus provides only limited protection. Active use of an exploit without sufficient mitigating measures should warrant the early release of a patch, even a preliminary, not fully tested patch.

In this case, Microsoft is taking too long.

The vulnerability itself has been known about for a while, but it was only a problem for a denial-of-service attack that would sometimes cause IE to crash. Up until now, no one knew how to mark the code and find it in memory to execute a remote code attack.

It used to be teenagers looking for bragging rights. Now it's done for profit.

Each patch (official or not) has a chance to 'blow up' and cause unintended side effects.

It?s sort of a wake-up call for Apple users. Everybody focuses on Windows, but there are viruses for other operating systems.

For home users: Apply the patch as soon as you can.

This laptop will infect your systems from the inside.

A new version can be pushed out every four hours. You can never catch up.

The Snort issue is more dangerous because the exploit is really simple.