After a month of security disasters, Microsoft offers new tool, progress report

At Black Hat today, Microsoft made several announcements intended to reassure its users that it was being as transparent as humanly possible regarding security vulnerabilities. These announcements came during a month when Microsoft was forced to defend itself and its security processes like a little leaguer in a 90 miles-per-hour batting cage.

The company has taken a lot of heat when it admitted that Office vulnerabilities are not something it can abolish. Today, the company countered by releasing a new visual analysis tool, OffVis (pictured below). OffVis examines security hacks by digging into Office binary files. The Microsoft Office Visualization Tool (OffVis) was originally created for Microsoft security researchers and anti-malware software makers to help them identify and write detection signatures. Today Microsoft has made it available to the public. It gives them a view of any Microsoft Office binary file format by hovering a curser over it. IT professionals can use OffVis for incident forensics. It can help users determine that multiple hacks actually came from the same file-level flaw, says Andrew Cushman, Security Director for Microsoft Security Response Center.