A Google engineer today published attack code that exploits a zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP, giving hackers a new way to hijack and infect systems with malware. But other security experts objected to the way the engineer disclosed the bug -- just five days after it was reported to Microsoft -- and said the move is more evidence of the ongoing, and increasingly public, war between the two giants.

"Upon successful exploitation, a remote attacker is able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the current user," Ormandy wrote. According to Ormandy, his attack scenario works using all major browsers, including Microsoft's newest, IE8. The bug is even easier to exploit when the machine has Windows Media Player, software that's installed by default with all versions of Windows.