After Google, Yahoo and other high-profile companies were victimized by coordinated attacks by Chinese hackers earlier this month, Microsoft Thursday delivered a relatively rare “out-of-band” patch to its Internet Explorer browser software.
Microsoft shipped an out-of-band patch Thursday to fix a zero-day vulnerability of which the company hadn’t aware until it was used to hack Google China sites.
The patch comes in the form of a cumulative update for virtually all versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said in a statement Wednesday.
The rare “out-of-band” patch—so named because Microsoft did not issue it during on one of its monthly Patch Tuesday update roundups—tackles a previously unknown zero-day bug that became one of the main avenues of penetration used in a spate of hacker attacks on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) China’s Web sites.
The search and online advertising giant revealed it was attacked last week and announced that it was considering pulling out of the People’s Republic over issues of censorship and cyber security.