Microsoft

Microsoft is ending its support for Intel's Itanium processor with the current version of its Windows Server OS, according to a Microsoft blog posting Friday.

"Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version of Windows Server to support the Intel Itanium architecture," Dan Reger , a Microsoft senior technical product manager, wrote on the Windows Server Division Weblog. "SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 are also the last versions to support Itanium."

IN WHAT might be the most obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black, Microsoft has claimed that its Internet Explorer 8 browser offers greater privacy than Google's Chrome.

The statement, which due to its sheer stupidity took some time for us to verify as not being part of an elaborate April Fools Day joke, was made by the Vole's Internet Explorer product manager Pete LePage. LePage's blog post on the firm's TechNet Edge website has since been removed, but not before it was reported by several sources.

Microsoft has discovered a slew of bugs in Office 2010 by building what amounts to a legitimate botnet for software testing. Engineers within Microsoft have created a grid-style system that employs unused computing time on internal PCs to run fuzz tests against its software.

Reports suggest that Microsoft has discovered over 1800 bugs in Office 2010 using the new system, which it calls the Distributed Fuzzing Framework.

Microsoft said that it patched the critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) earlier this week because the number of attacks jumped after news broke that the exploit had gone public.

Microsoft's explanation fit the expectations of several security researchers, who earlier this month predicted that the company would release an "out-of-band" update if attacks climbed, saying that that was the determining factor in Microsoft's decision-making process.

It's the publicity around zero-day bugs that drive Windows users to patch their software quickly, not the fact that Microsoft sounds the alarm by issuing an emergency update, a researcher said today.

Windows users rush to patch whenever a zero-day vulnerability is involved, even when Microsoft doesn't deliver the fix in an out-of-band update, said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, a California-based security risk and compliance management provider.

So far 2010 hasn't been kind to the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. It is only March, and Microsoft is releasing the second emergency out-of-band patch to respond to a zero-day exploit in the wild.

Microsoft released security bulletin MS10-018 today -- an update rated as Critical which includes 10 patches affecting all versions of Internet Explorer, including the current zero-day exploit being used to attack IE6 and IE7 browsers. Exploit code for the IE zero-day, dubbed "iepeers", is circulating on the internet.

Microsoft today announced it will issue an emergency security update for Internet Explorer (IE) tomorrow to patch a zero-day vulnerability that has been used to launch drive-by attacks for at least several weeks.

Tuesday's update will be the second out-of-band update -- Microsoft's term for one outside its normal once-each-month Patch Tuesday -- in the last three months. Microsoft last shipped a rush IE update to customers in late January, to fix eight flaws, including one that had been used to attack several companies' networks, including Google's and Adobe's.

Last week we reported that during Pwn2Own, two hackers were able to sidestep Windows 7's data execution prevention (DEP) and address space layout randomization (ASLR), and hack into Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6. One of the hackers, Peter Vreugdenhil, a freelance vulnerability researcher from the Netherlands, said that he used "fuzzing" to uncover two vulnerabilities in a fully-patched version of 64-bit Windows 7.

In Microsoft’s never-ending battle to stop piracy, it appears Microsoft is considering upping the ante in Windows 8 and other products by searching for a new candidate to help “shake hackers and crackers off Microsoft products” by designing and building “new anti-hacking mechanisms” and “hack detection.” The job ad says the job is “not for the faint of heart,” so I imagine things get pretty intense and technical on this team.

To quote the job ad directly:

That luscious HTC HD2, the near-perfect mobile that had it going on in all the right places, save the WinMo 6.5 OS, is seen here doing the impossible: Running a Windows Phone 7 Series ROM.

I say impossible because the hardware just doesn’t support Microsoft’s chassis requirements for a Windows Phone 7 Series…phone (man, that’s redundant). The hangup is the hardware, as the HTC HD2 lacks a dedicated Bing search key.