Microsoft To Release Office 2007 SP1 Via Automatic Update In June

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Microsoft plans to release Office 2007 Service Pack 1 via the company's automatic update service starting June 16.The advanced announcement is a result of the software maker's promise to give at least a 30-day notice before making Office service packs available through Microsoft Update, which is a part of Windows ...

Windows Vista More Vulnerable To Malware Than Windows 2000

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Microsoft's Vista operating system is more susceptible to malware than Windows 2000, and though it's 37% more secure than Windows XP, it's still too vulnerable.That's the contention of security vendor PC Tools, which has a financial interest in the vulnerability of Microsoft's software. "Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed ...

Sandman - Read the Windows Hibernation File

Monday, May 5th, 2008

This is a pretty new tool and a very cool one, Hibernation is a fairly new feature for Windows so it’s good to see a new tool targeting that. Microsoft provides a feature called Hibernation also know as suspend to disk that aims to save the system state into an undocumented ...

Microsoft Abandons Yahoo Acquisition

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Microsoft has dropped its nearly three-month-long pursuit of Yahoo, ending a historic acquisition attempt whose failure takes Microsoft back to square one in its quest to boost its online business to better compete against Google. "We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo and the market ...

Keep Vista’s User Account Control on guard duty

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Well, Microsoft has finally come clean about the real motivation behind Vista's User Account Control feature. As Tom Espiner's reports from the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft UAC Program Manager David Cross admits that UAC was designed to annoy users. Espiner quotes Cross telling the security-conference audience that negative ...

Microsoft offers assistance to combat mass SQL injection

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Microsoft has provided security advice to web developers using its products after many such sites were compromised. Last week, hundreds of thousands of web pages were infected with a malicious iframe which tries to infect visitors with a trojan. Many high profile sites including the United Nations (un.org), the UK ...

Reverse-Engineering Exploits from Patches

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The automatic patch-based exploit generation problem is: given a program P and a patched version of the program P', automatically generate an exploit for the potentially unknown vulnerability present in P but fixed in P'. In this paper, we propose techniques for automatic patch-based exploit generation, and show that our ...

Live Mesh Technology Preview Announced

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Today Microsoft is unveiling a technology preview to a really neat new software+services platform called Live Mesh. Live Mesh is a brand new platform that helps your devices act together through the internet enabling users such as you and me to manage, access, and share their files and applications from ...

Microsoft sees huge rise in Web attacks

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Criminals changed tactics in the last six months of 2007, dropping malicious email in favour of Web-based attacks, according to data reported to Microsoft by Windows users. The company saw the number of Trojan downloader programs it removed from Windows machines jump by 300 percent, according to Jimmy Kuo, principal architect ...

Disabling UAC for Only Administrators

Monday, April 21st, 2008

You can disable the—sometimes annoying—User Account Control (UAC) prompts for members of the Administrators group, while leaving them active for limited user accounts. This is great if you don’t want others accessing or changing system settings. Disabling the alerts, however, requires editing the Windows Registry: Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System Name: ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin Type: REG_DWORD Value: 0 ...