Microsoft downplays stealth Windows Update file updates
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Automatic updates to Windows Updates in August occurred without prior notification to users.
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The new flaw is unrelated to the help-file flaws discovered by a Chinese security company last week. Microsoft took the Chinese security group to task for disclosing the vulnerability without giving the company a chance to develop a fix.
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Computer giant Microsoft has fully rolled out its crucial security update to computers running its Windows XP. Last week, it &quot;soft launched&quot; Service Pack 2 (SP2) security update, making it available for some
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Microsoft has been reticent to commit publicly on how, when and whether it would make the browser-specific security fixes that it delivered as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 available to users of older versions of Windows.
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MicrosoftÂ has quietly released an update to Windows XP to fix a potentially serious configuration problem in the firewall that ships as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has rolled out its monthly security updates for December, patching critical flaws in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Format, and the Visual Studio 2005 development software. The seven security patches address 11 bugs, including two in the Windows Media Player software. However, no fixes were provided for two Microsoft Word flaws that have been used in a small number of attacks during the past week. Microsoft had said it would release only six patches on Tuesday, but the company added the Windows Media Format update at the last minute, after reports of attacks based on this vulnerability began surfacing. The Windows Media Format is used by Microsoft's Windows Media Player software. In late November, security vendors warned that a buffer overflow error could occur when the Windows Media Player processed ".asx" (Advanced Stream Redirector) media files, meaning that users would first need to be tricked into opening a malicious media file for the attack to work. In its update Tuesday, Microsoft also patched a similar bug in the way the media player processes ".asf" (Advanced Systems Format) files. The Internet Explorer patch fixes four bugs. It is also rated critical, and is noteworthy because some of these bugs will probably begin to be exploited by hackers by week's end, said Gunter Ollmann, director of IBM Corp.'s Internet Security System's X-Force threat analysis service. Enterprise administrators should also pay close attention to an SNMP (Simple Network Monitoring Protocol) patch issued Tuesday, Ollmann said. Microsoft has rated this patch as "important," rather than critical because SNMP is normally blocked at the firewall and turned off by default on Windows systems. However, it is widely deployed as part of the network monitoring infrastructure in the enterprise, and is often used on critical servers, Ollmann said. Ollmann believes this SNMP patch is the "most important" update for enterprise customers. "Since the service is widely deployed in the enterprise and since it's commonly deployed on servers, we think this would be an important attack vector for enterprises," he said. The remaining updates include a "critical" fix for Visual Studio 2005, and "important" updates for Windows and Outlook Express, Microsoft said. Microsoft defines "critical" flaws as bugs that could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without any action on the part of the victim. The company's next set of security updates are due Jan. 9.
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Microsoft has released its last regular security update of the year which includes five new patches, all rated &#39;important&#39;, and the reissue of a &#39;critical&#39; patch after extensive revisions.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is starting to ramp up distribution of its massive security update for the Windows XP operating system, but analysts say they still expect the company to move at a relatively slow pace to avoid widespread glitches...
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Microsoft Corp. is starting to ramp up distribution of its massive security update for the Windows XP operating system, but analysts say they still expect the company to move at a relatively slow pace to avoid widespread glitches.
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Users of Microsoft&#39;s Windows XP computer operating system should be on the lookout for the latest round of updates and patches, which fix several security problems but lack any real security advancements.
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Microsoft has released the Windows update for businesses, but only one of the major security providers has protection available for it.
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Microsoft has started to send out its latest major security patch to home PCs--but some people won&#39;t get it for a while.
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Root of recent Windows Updates woes? Microsoft's OneCare security tool changes Automatic Update settings as it installs.
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On October 10, Microsoft will issue 11 security bulletins as part of this month's Patch Tuesday. Six of the updates affect Windows, with the highest severity being "critical." Another four patches will cover Microsoft Office, also with critical severity, while a moderate fix is slated for the .NET Framework.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will release five sets of security patches next Tuesday, including a critical update for users of Windows 2000,Â the company saidÂ Thursday. With the remaining four security updates rated as "important" by Microsoft, this latest round of patches appears to be less worrisome than the August updates. Last month,Â Microsoft released nine updates, six of which were rated critical. Microsoft rates its bug fixes as critical when attackers can exploit the flaws without requiring any user action. Also set to be patched this month are Visual Studio, Windows Services for Unix, SharePoint Services, and the Windows Live and MSN Messenger software. Microsoft releases its security patches on the second Tuesday of each month, generally around 11 a.m., Pacific time. With this latest rounds of patches, Microsoft will have released 55 updates in 2007, the same number it had released by September of last year.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ released its February set of security updates Tuesday, including critical fixes for bugs in Office and the scanning engine used by the company's security products. The security software flaw is of particular concern because it could, in theory, be very easily exploited by an attacker to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC. The bug has to do with the way that Microsoft's Malware Protection Engine, used by Windows Live One Care and Windows Defender, processes PDF files. Windows Defender is available for free and ships with Microsoft's Vista operating system. "An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted PDF File that could potentially allow remote code execution when the target computer system receives, and the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans, the PDF file," Microsoft said in its bulletin on the patch. This engine is also used by Microsoft's Antigen and Windows Forefront Security products, meaning that Exchange servers running these products could also be compromised. Although there is not yet any known attack that exploits this flaw, it could become a serious problem for Windows users running Microsoft's security products, according to Amol Sarwate, vulnerability lab manager at Qualys. "These attacks are very difficult to avoid," he said. "These products run automatically in the background." Symantec rated this scanning engine flaw the most critical of the vulnerabilities patched on Tuesday. Microsoft actually released the patch for this flaw on Jan. 26, although it did not notify customers of this bug until Tuesday's bulletin, said Mark Griesi, a security program manager with the company's Trustworthy Computing group. Griesi said that there was no particular reason why Microsoft declined to notify customers of the update. But the fact that this was Microsoft's first security product patch since implementing its monthly system apparently contributed to the decision. "It was one of those first-time situations: 'Should we say something now or should we just wait,'" he said. "This time we decided to wait. We won't do it again." In total, six of Microsoft's 12 updates are rated as "critical," the other six have the less-serious rating of "important." Among the patches is a widely anticipated update for Microsoft Word , which fixes six bugs in Microsoft's word processing software. Hackers had been exploiting a number of these bugs in very targeted attacks over the past few months. The updates fix 20 bugs in total, including all four of the Word flaws that hackers had been exploiting, Griesi said. Other critical patches fix bugs in the ActiveX HTML Help control and Microsoft Data Access Components, both used by Windows, as well as flaws in Office and Internet Explorer.
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Microsoft Corp. has started updating files on computers running Windows XP and Vista, even though users have disabled the operating systems' automatic update feature, researchers said today.