On a day when Java zero day exploits were fingered in attacks against Apple, Facebook and Twitter, Oracle released the remainder of its quarterly security patch updates for the Java platform.Five vulnerabilities were patched in Java 7 Update 15 today, all of them remotely exploitable, and three of them rated of the highest criticality by Oracle.

Apple is the latest major American company to enter the security confessional and disclose it has been breached. The company told Reuters today it was attacked by the same crew that hit Facebook, which disclosed its breach last Friday, and that like the social media giant, no data had been stolen.

W32/Autorun.worm.aaeb-h is an evolved, virtual machine-aware AutoRun worm that makes use of  obfuscation and polymorphic techniques in order to evade detection and infect removable media and mounted network shares, according to McAfee.Researchers have seen an increase in samples for the year-old malware family, which is compiled in Visual Basic 6.

Gmail accounts are high-priority targets for attackers of all stripes, particularly spam crews and state-sponsored attackers who use them to monitor the activities of activists and journalists. Hijacking those accounts can be quite useful for spammers and malware gangs as well, but Google said that it has put security measures in place that have greatly reduced the number of successful hijack attempts.

A vulnerability exists in some components of BlackBerry mobile devices that could grant attackers access to instances of the company’s Enterprise Server (BES), according to Research in Motion (RIM), which issued an alert and released a patch for the vulnerability last week via its Knowledge Base support site. BES, the software implicated by the vulnerability, helps companies deploy BlackBerry devices.

China has been blamed for cyberattacks on every major industrial base in the United States—and even in some corners for the Super Bowl blackout. But most of it has been rampant speculation coupled with the lacing together of a number of loose ends. Examples of the kind of direct attribution to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) presented in a report today by security company Mandiant have been rare.

Laptops belonging to several Facebook employees were compromised recently and infected with malware that the company said was installed through the use of a Java zero-day exploit that bypassed the software’s sandbox. Facebook claims that no user data was affected by the attack and says that it has been working with law enforcement to investigate the attack, which also affected other unnamed companies.