Microsoft has said it will release a patch on Thursday to fix the Internet Explorer 6 flaw that hackers used recently to attack Google and other large companies. The attacks have triggered a slugfest between Google and the Chinese government. While the flaw can also be exploited in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, most of the attacks so far have been against IE6 on Windows XP because this combination of browser and operating system seems to be the most vulnerable. The situation raises the question of why large corporations continue to use IE6, which is now eight years old.
