Microsoft

Microsoft silently patched three vulnerabilities last month, two of them affecting enterprise mission-critical Exchange mail servers, without calling out the bugs in the accompanying advisories, a security expert said today.

Two of the three unannounced vulnerabilities, and the most serious of the trio, were packaged with MS10-024, an update to Exchange and Windows SMTP Service that Microsoft issued April 13 and tagged as "important," its second-highest threat ranking.

Microsoft is prepping two patches for next week's monthly security update, according to an advance notification released Thursday, but there are no plans to release a fix for a dangerous SharePoint flaw that was disclosed last week.

The patches, to arrive on Tuesday, fix one vulnerability each. One of the flaws resides in Windows, the other in Office. Users running Windows 7 and 2008 R2 are not impacted by either of the bugs, Jerry Bryant, group manager of response communications at Microsoft, said in a blog post Thursday.

Hackers have managed to get their hands on the Windows Phone 7 ROM and have unearthed some interesting details about the upcoming smartphone platform from Microsoft.

The most notable inclusion in Windows Phone 7 is native support for the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft has allegedly integrated the ability to uninstall apps from the platform in the same way that you would from your home PC, although it is important to remember that the hackers have only got their hands on a rough build of Windows Phone 7 and so much could change before it is launched.

The corporate vice president of Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Trustworthy Computing group is aiming to map out a plan for how businesses, governments, and individuals need to look at and deal with international cybercrime.

Charney voiced his views and his concerns with cybersecurity's present shortcomings this week in a blog post, in a white paper, and in a presentation at the EastWest Institute's Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas.

Microsoft released a second "platform preview" version of Internet Explorer 9 on Wednesday with faster JavaScript and better Web standards compliance--plus an argument for how future Web technology should develop.

Central to the second IE9 preview (download) is progress toward matching rivals in SunSpider, a speed test of Web-based JavaScript programs, and Acid3, a test of adherence to some Web technologies. On the first, Microsoft improved from 590 to 473 milliseconds; on the second, from 55 to 68 out of a possible 100. But there's more to the story than benchmarks.

Microsoft has released a new version of its Producer software, fixing a critical security problem that plagued the product for several months.

Producer is a free add-on tool that helps users capture and add multimedia components to their PowerPoint presentations.

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Monday re-released a comprehensive security update for Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Producer, which until now left the application vulnerable to malicious attacks.

The updated security patch incorporated a fix in Microsoft Producer 2003 that replaces the older, vulnerable application. Users can now install Producer for PowerPoint to address the issue.

Microsoft's browser market share continued to fall in April, with Internet Explorer now in use for fewer than three in five Web connections.

IE's share of the market in April was 59.95, down from 60.65 percent in March, according to Net Applications. Google's Chrome grabbed the lion's share of that, increasing to 6.73 percent from 6.13 percent, while Firefox also gained nearly a tenth of a percentage point, to finish April with 24.59 percent.

Microsoft should add a basic PDF viewer to Windows to help protect users from the spike in attacks exploiting bugs in Adobe's Reader, a security researcher said Friday.

Microsoft has finally confirmed that it has been working on a tablet concept known as "Courier," but the company has also announced that it has "no plans to build such a device at this time."

In 2008, Microsoft floated a mobile collaboration app for Windows Mobile under the name Courier. Nobody seemed to notice, given the overshadowing presence of iPhone 2.0 over the mobile software market.