Most of you have heard of a reportedly widespread compromise of an unknown number of clients through an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The clients were owned by visiting commercial web sites that had previously been compromised by a yet undetermined method; the attackers dropping code onto those servers that customers would then launch when the site was visited.
Microsoft has hailed Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) as a "victory for the security guys" and its new features have been welcomed by users at the software giant's annual Tech Ed conference in Amsterdam this week.
Officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology hope their new publication will help simplify the process of setting security controls on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Professional operating system.
NIST officials, who released the draft of Special Publication 800-68 this week, said the recommendations and security configuration checklists will help federal agencies fulfill their responsibilities for computer and information security under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002.
Apple Computer Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs says the 2005 launch of the next Mac OS X operating system will have features "way ahead" of Microsoft Corp.'s next Windows release due out in 2006.
"It's going to drive the copycats crazy," Jobs said Monday before an enthusiastic audience at the opening keynote of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center.
Code-named "Tiger," the upgrade will be the fifth version of Mac OS X in its four-year history.
US CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team), is advising people to ditch Internet Explorer and use a different browser after the latest security vulnerability in the software was exposed.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates defended the company's handling of security patches Monday following widespread attacks on the Internet by suspected Russian organized crime gangs.
Last week's attacks used unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to deploy a Trojan horse program on the victim's machine, which could capture the user's Internet banking passwords. The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center reported the attacks were launched through a large number of websites, some of them "quite popular," which had been penetrated and modified to deliver malicious code.
Mitch Denny has written some sample code that allows developers to more easily interact with the new firewall design that is part of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Denny said that his code, FirewallPermission, "is a custom permission and associated declaritive security attribute which uses the Windows Firewall COM interfaces to check whether a program has inbound access on a port enabled."
Microsoft's top network security manager appeared at a company road show Tuesday to let other administrators know what the software giant is doing to help keep corporate networks safe.
Speaking at Microsoft's Security Summit, a 20-city tour to showcase the software giant's latest technologies regarding Internet threats, Richard Devenuti, corporate vice-president for Microsoft's Services and IT unit, highlighted improvements in the company's software and told how those improvements had been incorporated into Microsoft's own networks.
The Microsoft Windows operating system supports thousands of devices. More than 30,000 drivers have been released, and more are introduced daily. Some of these drivers are based on models that were designed more than 10 years ago. Although these models represented the state of the art at the time, today's devices and operating system technologies stretch these outdated designs to their limits.
When will MSN bite the bullet and come up to par with its Hotmail competitors, particularly in the area of free e-mail storage?
For now, MSN is still offering the same 2 MB of free e-mail storage — compared to the 1 GB offered by Google's newly minted Gmail and the 100 MB now offered by Yahoo Mail. (Microsoft currently charges $60 a year for 100 MB of free Hotmail storage.)
BetaNews is reporting that MSN has pinpointed July as the target date for launching its e-mail storage counterattack.
