Mary Landesman, senior researcher, ScanSafe, said: “These were very targeted attacks, but nothing special in terms of what we all see every day. Many Trojans are given names by security companies like 'gamerpassword stealer' but this is rubbish – modern malware will behave differently depending on the resources of the system it has compromised. Zero-day flaws in widely-installed products are a fact of daily life, not a one-off incident.”

Landesman continued: “I think Google deserves praise for coming forward and admitting the issue, which is something that few enterprises have been comfortable doing in the past, but the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that has been spread around by some other vendors has undone much of the good that was achieved. A lot of the bigger picture has been lost in the detail.”

Initially reported by Google as a "a highly sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from China, the compromise – dubbed 'Operation Aurora' - of up to 30 companies including Adobe and Rackspace has seen intense speculation and interest. Reaction has been unusually broad, with even the German and French governments weighing in with warnings to citizens that all versions of IE are dangerous, and urging the choice of another browser.

"The attacks we have seen to date, including the exploit released publicly, only affect customers using Internet Explorer 6," said Microsoft in a statement."We recommend users of IE 6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP", Microsoft said in its analysis. "We also recommend users of Windows XP upgrade to newer versions of Windows."

The initial compromise was reportedly aimed at compromising a series of Gmail accounts used by Chinese anti-government activists. However, the widening scope of the compromises

Landesman continued: “I also wonder how exclusively Chinese these were – some of the terms used in the code are more indicative of Morocco and India, and it's these small, innocent hints that arouse one's suspicions.”

Whether genuinely Chinese or not, the attacks have caused potentially serious political ripples, with Google cancelling the launch of several phones in China alongside general threats to withdraw entirely from the Chinese market. How much this is due to the recent attacks, and how much the ongoing censorship demands by the Chinese government is debatable.