He said that none of the vulnerabilities had posed a particularly severe threat to customers at any time. "The best practices of N-CIRT and US-CERT [are] they disclose all vulnerabilities that are discovered. They were following a fairly standard process" in disclosing the flaws, Armstrong said.

Secure Elements is the second security vendor to appear in the news over the past few days because of flaws in its products. Last week, industry leader Symantec Corp. confirmed a serious flaw in its antivirus products that was discovered by eEye Digital Security Inc. The flaw, which potentially allowed malicious attackers to write worms targeting users running the affected software, was patched by Symantec over the weekend.

In March, a faulty antivirus software update from McAfee Inc. wreaked havoc on users when it mistakenly identified hundreds of legitimate programs as a Windows virus, causing users to accidentally delete data from affected computers.