A week in security: Apple and Microsoft patch numerous flaws

This week Microsoft and Apple fix critical flaws, social networks come under pressure and there are more hacking incidents in China

It was a busy week this week for both Apple and Microsoft, after the two tech giants were forced to patch critical flaws in their products, while Google’s spat with China continued and social networks were found wanting once again.

First, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer product was found wanting again, with the firm forced to issue an out-of-cycle patch for IE6 and IE7, the second time this year Redmond has had to release a patch outside its regular schedule.

"The out-of-band security bulletin is a cumulative security update for IE and will also contain fixes for privately reported vulnerabilities rated 'critical' on all versions of IE that are not related to this attack," said the company.

On the same day, Apple issued major security updates for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), as well as additional performance and stability updates for Snow Leopard. The security update includes 69 fixes for various components in Leopard and Snow Leopard, including nine vulnerabilities in QuickTime and four in the ImageIO component.

There was more trouble for Google this week as the tit for tat battle between the web giant and the Chinese government continued.

It emerged early in the week that some of Google’s mobile services were being blocked by China, while a senior Google security researcher argued that the attacks it suffered in January originating in the region represented a much wider threat to the internet.

It’s not just Google bearing the brunt of hacking attacks in China though, as news emerged this week that the Yahoo Mail accounts of several foreign journalists in the region had been attacked.

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China is warning its members that email is not secure in China, and that alternative “means of arranging interviews and conducting other sensitive business are often preferable”.

It wasn’t a great week for social networks either, with Facebook suffering another privacy glitch which meant that users’ email addresses were briefly visible to everyone. Also this week security vendor Blue Coat Systems stressed the need for both administrators and security vendors to step up efforts to prevent social engineering attacks in the enterprise.

Finally, it was a week to forget for Barnet Council, which admitted that it had suffered a data breach of 9,000 children’s details, after unencrypted USBs and CDs were stolen from an employee’s home. This despite the fact it is against council policy to take data home on unencrypted devices.