Microsoft release an out-of-order patch yesterday for a critical vulnerability relating to custom fonts resulting in remote execution of code on a machine. More details here: http://gizmodo.com/go-update-windows-right-now-1719187152 Note that because Windows Server 2003 has just gone end-of-life, there is no update for it.
Wow, now this is a turn-around for the books – Microsoft bed-partner Miguel de Icaza saying that Moonlight development is being stopped specifically because a. Microsoft is concentrating on HTML5 and b. because Microsoft has imposed certain restrictions on Silverlight. Never thought I’d see the day … Hooray for the death of non-standard protocols and […]
Microsoft has always bigged up their products using whatever mechanisms they can, including paid-for campaigns/ads and sometimes outright lying. The latest statement that IE is the most secure browser ( according to their yourbrowsermatters website ) fits into this latter category. One has to wonder how Microsoft comes about the scores provided on the site. […]
Microsoft has always been accused of following the pack rather than innovating. So it’s no surprise that early screenshots of the Windows 8 copy dialogue seem to be a direct rip-off of the KDE 4 copy dialogue, from the ‘multiple copy operations in single dialogue’ visual aspect: to the bandwidth usage graphs: The […]
Well if there’s ever been an advertisement against cloud services, Microsoft is it. The recent spate of outages on Microsoft’s BPOS system continued this weekend past with a 7 hour outage at their Dublin data centre after an ‘act of God’ took out their power grid and backup generators. Microsoft said it would “proactively provide […]
Considering last month’s outage, one would have thought the okes at Microsoft would have beefed up the BPOS service offering but it’s not to be. There were problems logging into Exchange and SharePoint Online yesterday morning for about 3 hours. This outage, apparently caused by network hardware issues, mostly affected North America and British customers. […]
Since the release of SP1 for Win 7 and Server 2008 R2, there have quite a lot of issues relating to the installation of the service pack. Apparently many are seeing boot failures after the installation of the service pack, specifically with C00000034 fatal errors. Of course, those with WSUS will be getting automatic upgrades […]
The vulnerability could allow an attacker to cause a victim to run malicious scripts when visiting various Web sites, resulting in information disclosure. This impact is similar to server-side cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Even Google has released a statement regarding targeted attacks on IE users. Apparently this MHTML vulnerability has been around for 7 years. […]
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 should be available soon and won’t have much new functionality, but will have the usual hot fixes and patches. 3 items that will make an appearance are: Advanced Vector Extensions ( AVX ) which will be available in forthcoming processors RemoteFX – an extension to RDP Dynamic Memory – intelligent […]
Aw, aren’t we lucky ( well Windows users at least ) – G-Data and Sophos have stepped forward with free protection for the .lnk vulnerability. G-Data’s solution LNK-Checker displays no-entry signs for iconss associated with exploits while other icons function as normal.However, users can still click on malicious LNK files and start the malware manually, […]
The unpatched LNK vulnerability in all versions of Windows ( from XP onwards ) is attracting a lot more attention from malicious code authors. A further 2 exploits have been detected in the wild. The 1st .lnk trojan Stuxnet, was very specific about it’s payload, attacking Siemens SCADA software specifically. But the effectiveness of .lnk […]
A new malicious attack has been spreading through the internet in the last few weeks, initially using USB memory sticks to propagate. Called, the LNK vulnerability, the attack uses specially crafted shortcut (.lnk) files, which trick Windows into running code of an attacker’s choosing. Any Windows application that tries to display the shortcut’s icon—including Explorer—will […]
