In a Tuesday announcement, Microsoft said that it intends releasing an out-of-band patch on Wednesday, to fix the Internet Explorer’s “Aurora” vulnerability that was exploited to launch the recent hacker attacks against Google and some other companies.

Since Microsoft generally releases security patches on its standard ‘Patch Tuesday,’ Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, said that the break in the patch cycle became “inevitable” because of the “never-ending lack of attention on the Microsoft IE bug.”

The company claims that thus far “very limited, and in some cases, targeted attacks” have been made against IE 6. Though Microsoft had earlier said that the vulnerability had affected IE 6 running on Windows XP and probably Windows 2000; the same exploit was later found to have affected IE7 on Windows XP and Vista also.

With the IE vulnerability not affecting the “mass majority” of users, Storms is of the opinion that “careful browsing practices coupled with up-to-date antivirus will provide significant risk mitigation.”

Microsoft’s decision to issue a security patch ahead of its regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday next month comes in the wake of the immense media attention drawn by the targeted attacks in China.

Moreover, with Microsoft revealing that IE’s zero-day vulnerability was apparently a prime attack vector, Germany and France have been advising the Web users to discontinue the use of IE and look for alternative browsers.