Google on Tuesday said that in mid-December it faced "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google." Attackers were apparently attempting to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and also launched attacks against more than  

Later in the week, it was reported that a flaw in Internet Explorer had been exploited to hack into Google's corporate networks, and Microsoft said it is working on a .  

On Twitter and in blog postings, industry observers debated whether the attack is proof of security problems specific to cloud computing, a phrase that generally refers to computing resources made publicly available through the Internet.

"This was not an assault on cloud computing," Google asserted in its official blog. "It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure."

Google's main business is delivering advertising-supported Web search results, of course, but the company has also become a custodian of enterprise data because of services such as Google Apps, a Web-hosted alternative to Microsoft Exchange.