A security researcher has published code that could be used to take control of computers used to manage industrial machinery, potentially giving hackers a back door into utility companies, water plants, and even oil and gas refineries.

The software was published late Friday night by Kevin Finisterre, a researcher who said he wants to raise awareness of the vulnerabilities in these systems, problems that he said are often downplayed by software vendors. “These vendors are not being held responsible for the software that they’re producing,” said Finisterre, who is head of research with security testing firm Netragard. “They’re telling their customers that there is no problem, meanwhile this software is running critical infrastructure.”

Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn’t like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature for Web pages.

A Web image that is encoded as a scalable vector graphic, or SVG, can be resized to fit the computer screen or zoomed into without becoming blocky and losing sharpness, as happens with images encoded as the more traditional “bitmaps.” Maps are one popular use of SVG.

“If you look around at browsers, you’ll find that most of them support scalable vector graphics,” Berners-Lee said. “I’ll let you figure out which one has been slow in supporting SVG.”