It seems each of the thousands ActiveX controls that make up the Windows System has at least one vulnerability hiding somewhere waiting to be exploited. The recent one is HHCtrl (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-001), which has not been the first and will not be the last one too.

The simple and efficient way to avoid ActiveX vulnerabilities is to prevent applications from creating unnecessary or unsecure ActiveX objects. For example, HHCtrl is not necessary to Internet Explorer and should not be used by Internet Explorer.

With Active Watch, you can monitor and control the use of per ActiveX object by per application. By clicking a button, you can put an application under the control or take it out of the control.

You don't have to know anything about ActiveX to be able to use Active Watch. Active Watch is designed on a simple theory: After runing for a reasonable period of time or a reasonable number of times, an application can be supposed to have populated all the ActiveX objects that are necessary to it, and any others can be considered as unnecessary and should be prohibited. At this stage, we can Enable Active Filter to prevent any other ActiveX object from being created by the application.