Microsoft Corp. is working hard to introduce a patch for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to tackle a serious flaw that could permit an attacker to have control over users’ computers.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft informed users about the vulnerabilities in IE6 and IE7. The Israeli security researcher Moshe Ben Abu grasped the exploit code from a website which was being used to carry out "drive-by" attacks.

"This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows. Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications”, said Jerry Bryant, Senior Security Communications Manager Lead at Microsoft.

Microsoft yesterday introduced an automatic "Fix it" apparatus to halt the component in the "iepeers. dll" file that includes the flaw.

Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome and Opera Software's Opera, the popular rivals of Microsoft’s IE, have been protected against the attacks aimed at IE6 and 7.