Studio Press

The government has issued an alert to civil servants, advising them how to mitigate the risk of a widely publicised flaw in Internet Explorer.

The Cabinet Office on Wednesday urged government departments to use workarounds outlined in a Microsoft advisory on the flaw, as there is no patch available. The software maker is telling customers using IE6 and IE7 to update to the more robust IE8 amid recommendations from security organisations that users switch to another browser until the problem is fixed.

Microsoft has promised an out-of-band patch for the invalid pointer reference issue in Internet Explorer. The flaw, which was exploited by Chinese hacks against Google, has had major repercussions in Google's relationship with the Chinese authorities.