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Despite a strong marketing campaign from Apple in the UK, sales of the iPhone suggest it has failed to impress customers across the UK.

The Financial Times reported that “people familiar with the situation” said that O2, the network operator exclusively carrying the iPhone, has sold 10,000 fewer iPhones than expected since its November 9th launch.

Analysts had expected to sell 200,000 of the devices as a conservative estimate.

A spokesman for O2 however said that “those figures did not come from us” and stated that despite the negative reports, “we continue however to be delighted with the device, which is fastest-selling device we have ever had”.

The high cost and long contract have been keep customers from signing new contracts, with the minimum cost for an iPhone and an 18-month contract at an amazing £269 plus £35 per month.

Microsoft warned companies on Monday that a flaw in the way Windows searches for Web proxies could allow an attacker the ability to reroute traffic through a malicious server.

The security issues occur when a Windows computer attempts to find a proxy server using Microsoft’s Web Proxy Automatic Discovery (WPAD) technology and the organization’s domain name starts at the third level or deeper, such as somecompany.co.jp, the software giant stated in an advisory. The WPAD search first attempts to find the server using the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), and if it doesn’t find the server will try the next higher level of the domain name. For example, a search for a proxy server in somecompany.co.jp will look for servername.somecompany.co.jp and then move on to servername.co.jp, which could be a malicious server outside the company’s network.

“At this time, we are not aware of attacks attempting to use the reported vulnerability, but we will continue to track this issue,” Tim Rains, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, said on the teams’ blog. “The advisory contains several mitigations that customers can use to help protect themselves from attackers.”

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The government has been criticised yet again after more than 100 websites were found to be selling the personal details of UK bank customers.

An investigation by The Times claimed that it could download the information for 32 UK customers, with one vendor allegedly willing to sell 30,000 British credit card numbers for just £1 each.

In response, the Information Commissioner has said an investigation will be launched into what was described as active accounts, according to a spokesman for the commissioner.

One analyst believes that the government must work now to enforce tougher security regulations that would prevent such incidents.

“We strongly believe that the government should introduce more stringent data breach laws and prosecute any organisation which takes such a laissez faire approach to protecting customer data,” stated Brian Spector, general manager at information security company Workshare.

Meanwhile the spokesman for the commissioner stated that the investigation would initially look at what security breach, if any, had taken place.