The Web was abuzz Wednesday after it was revealed that a hacker had exposed corporate information about Twitter after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. The breach raised red flags for individuals as well as businesses about the passwords used to secure information they store on the Web.

On Web sites containing personal information like e-mail, financial data or documents, there is usually just a user name and password for protection. More individuals are storing information on Web servers, where it is accessible from any online computer through services offered by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, social networks like Facebook or back-up services like Mozy.

But password-protected sites are growing more vulnerable because to keep up with the growing number of passwords, people use the same simple ones on numerous sites across the Web. In a study last year, Sophos, a security firm, found that 40 percent of Internet users use the same password for every Web site they access.

The disappearance of certain titles quickly led to public uproar. The online retailer says more than 57000 books were affected, including those about gays, lesbians, health and erotica.

Microsoft will push out an emergency security patch for Internet Explorer on Wednesday, addressing a critical security hole currently being exploited in the wild.

Redmond issued advanced notice for tomorrow’s fix, describing the out-of-cycle patch as protection from “remote code execution.”

Unscheduled updates are pretty rare for Microsoft, stressing the potentially serious nature of the flaw. Although the last time Microsoft broke it’s update cycle was in late October – it was the first time it had done so in about 18 months.

The latest zero-day vulnerability stems from data binding bugs that allows hackers access to a computer’s memory space, allowing attackers to remotely execute malicious code as IE crashes, Microsoft has said.