Israeli researcher Moshe Ben Abu used a clue in a Wednesday blog post by McAfee to grab an in-the-wild exploit, strip it of its obfuscations and use it to craft a working attack module for the popular Metasploit open-source penetration framework.

"People love to hate Microsoft, and they are usually very techie types and early adopters that see flaws in engineering and strategy," says Sheri McLeish, an analyst covering information and knowledge management at Forrester Research. "Microsoft bundled IE with Windows, which added to its very long and dramatic history with the hubbub around Netscape, for example. But the browser market epitomizes the company's challenges as it looks to improve market share and faces a lot of dislike and distrust in terms of Microsoft's competitive nature."