Microsoft added a few final tweaks to its Internet Explorer 8 beta, resolving security issues in the browser aimed at preventing attackers from executing malicious attacks remotely on Windows. The fix addressed a security flaw brought to light by security researchers Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd during the August BlackHat USA conference in Las Vegas.
Microsoft reckons it’s found a way to stop pirates in their tracks, announcing tweaks to its Games for Windows service to block out online software thievery.
Announcing the move at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Microsoft said its new service would use “server-side authentication help prevent game piracy before street date” - as we understand it, that means each game supported by Games for Windows will ‘phone home’ to a Microsoft server before letting you play.
A recently released report claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is more than twice as effective at blocking malware sites than its nearest rival.
According to NSS Labs, which conducted the Microsoft-sponsored study, IE8 blocked 69% of the 492 malware-distributing Web sites that were included in the survey data. Mozilla's Firefox, meanwhile, blocked only 30% of those same sites. "I was surprised that IE8 did as well as it did," Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, said in an interview Tuesday. "But Microsoft has put a lot of effort into security in IE8."
This is Microsoft’s first update to their infamous browser since August 2006. Back then, Internet Explorer was the king of the web browsers. But with Mozilla Firefox nipping at its heels, not to mention Google’s introduction of its own browser, Chrome, and IE 8 has a lot more competition to ward off. Microsoft needed to make IE 8 faster, safer and easier to use than ever.
Internet Explorer 8 was released at noon on Thursday and users have already flooded the pages of Microsoft’s feedback pages with complaints. It hasn’t done too hot with Pwn2Own and got hacked easily. Although many problems were supposed to be resolved during the beta testing phase, it still seems that there are multiple issues affecting the web browser.
Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it's still under development.
Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was marred by news that the browser, touted to be its most secure ever, already has been hacked. The launch has also kicked off a new round of browser wars, with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) unveiling a new beta of its Chrome browser, and Mozilla releasing Fennec, the mobile version of its Firefox browser, in beta.
The office of the Indian Prime Minister has reportedly ditched Microsoft's Outlook for open-source email following a computer virus that caused a massive breakdown in communications.
The PMO has dumped Outlook Express for SquirrelMail, it has emerged, following an outage that saw emails go missing and unanswered during a three-month period last year.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) will migrate some 40,000 student user accounts to Microsoft's Live@edu hosted messaging and storage platform providing an alternative to the successful Google Apps education surge.
According to Microsoft, QUT joins "thousands of institutions around the world" by moving to the Live@edu platform, but the news of such deals has been mostly of Google's equivalent offering, including a recent Adelaide University win.
Exactly one year after a security researcher notified Microsoft of a serious security vulnerability affecting all supporting version of Windows (including Vista and Windows Server 2008), the issue remains unpatched and now comes word that there are in-the-wild exploits circulating.
