Microsoft says controversial Office SP3 was never in Automatic Updates
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The controversial Service Pack 3 was never distributed to Microsoft Office end users through Automatic Updates, Microsoft told BetaNews. So if you're a Lotus Notes or Corel Quattro user who wants to undo its impact, you can.
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TechWeb - While no one is saying the update is fixing flaws, HP said it decided to wait until the better version of the software was available.
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It is unclear whether any of the three patches Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is releasing tomorrow will address a recently identified flaw that one security firm upgraded on Friday to 'extremely critical.'
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Microsoft releases patches for three security holes, but does not have a fix for a Word 2000 flaw being used in attacks.
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Users of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition are scheduled to begin receiving Service Pack 2 via automatic update starting today. But delivery of the Professional Edition has been delayed at least a week while Microsoft and its users grapple ...
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MICROSOFT has delayed automated distribution of a major security upgrade to its Windows XP Professional operating system, citing a desire to give companies more time to test it.
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Microsoft released 11 security updates Tuesday to&#160;fix critical flaws in its products, including a publicly known ActiveX bug that affects users of the Visual FoxPro database.In total, 17 individual software flaws were patched in the updates. Microsoft rates six updates as critical, meaning they should be installed as soon as possible, while the remaining five updates are considered &quot;important.&quot; Last month was an easier month on IT administrators, when Microsoft released just two updates.Microsoft surprised some by releasing one&#160;fewer update than expected. Last Thursday, the software vendor had said that it was&#160;readying a fix&#160;for critical VBScript and JScript flaws in Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003. That update wasn&#39;t included in this week&#39;s patches, but on Tuesday, Microsoft wouldn&#39;t confirm that it had actually dropped the update because &quot;this could put customers at risk,&quot; according a spokeswoman for the company&#39;s public relations agency.Security experts said Tuesday that the MS08-010 update, which fixes four bugs in Internet Explorer, should take top priority this week. &quot;There are four vulnerabilities within that particular patch and all of them are remote-code executable,&quot; said Jonathan Bitle, director of technical account management with Qualys.&quot;The way we&#39;re looking at it, our prioritization would put MS08-010 at the top, followed by MS08-007,&quot; said Don Leatham, director of solutions and strategy with Lumension Security.MS08-010 fixes a publicly disclosed ActiveX bug that affects Visual FoxPro users. Although hackers have already posted code showing how to exploit this vulnerability, the buggy ActiveX control is not included in Internet Explorer 7&#39;s default list of controls, so the flaw should not affect most users.The MS08-007 update fixes a critical flaw in the Windows XP and Vista WebDAV redirector software. WebDAV is a Web-based document sharing protocol. The flaw is rated important for Windows Server 2003 users.Microsoft&#39;s Office products are also a major source of patches this month. Tuesday&#39;s updates include critical fixes for Microsoft Word, Office Publisher, and Office itself. There is also a critical update for Windows&#39; Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) Automation software. The remaining updates, rated important, are for Active Directory, the Vista TCP/IP stack, the Microsoft Works file converter, and two bugs in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server.The Patch Tuesday updates show that client-side bugs continue to be a much higher risk than server-side vulnerabilities, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle. &quot;One would have assumed that the IIS and Active Directory vulnerabilities would have been the most serious because they stand at the core of an enterprise and provide more critical services,&quot; he said via instant message. &quot;But with this month&#39;s patches, the hacker&#39;s best bet is to take advantage of the client-side attacks.&quot;
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Microsoft temporarily omitted mention of the Mac edition of Office in a write-up that accompanied one of Tuesday's security updates.
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(InfoWorld) - With hackers exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in its Windows and Office software, Microsoft plans to issue 11 security updates next Tuesday. Some of the Office and Windows updates will be for critical flaws that could be exploited by attackers with no action on the part of users. Six of the patches will be for Windows, and four of them will be for Office, MicrosoftÂ said Thursday in a note on its Web site. The 11th update will be for a flaw in Microsoft's .Net framework, which is considered less severe than the critical Windows and Office patches. Hackers have been keeping Microsoft's Security Response Center busy this past month. Microsoft generally issues its security patches on the second Tuesday of every month, but last weekÂ the company was forced to issue a rare, "out-of-cycle" security patchÂ after criminals began exploiting a flaw in Internet Explorer's VML (Vector Markup Language) rendering engine. And security experts have also warned of cyberattacks based on unpatched flaws in PowerPoint, Word 2000 and in an ActiveX control (called WebViewFolderIcon) used by the Windows' graphical user interface software. The WebViewFolderIcon flaw will be patched Tuesday, Microsoft said. Attacks that take advantage of this flaw have been seen on the Internet, the SANS Internet Storm CenterÂ warned earlier this week. Â
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Microsoft has no plans to release a set of tools for Office 2007 that would allow users to access blocked file formats, even though it did so for customers running Office 2003 Service Pack 3.
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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 announced that it would add Office 2003 SP3 to its Microsoft Update listings beginning February 27.
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Microsoft Corp. has released new tools allowing users of Office 2003 SP3 to unblock a host of barred file types and apologized to software rival Corel for saying its file format posed a security risk.
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Some say Win XP SP2 enhancements cause conflicts, don't protect as claimed.
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"Extremely critical flaw" in Microsoft Word 2000, which has no released patch, could lead to remote execution of code.
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With automatic download of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) enormous SP2 security patch to the Windows XP operating system set to begin, the industry still waits to understand its ramifications. Home users that have their preferences set to receive operating-system updates as they are made available by Microsoft may be surprised to learn that some of the software they already run on their systems could be disabled by SP2 or may run very differently.
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NOVEMBER 05, 2004  - A Microsoft Corp. vice president this week confirmed that the company intends to continue its track record of shipping a new version of its Office System software every two to three years.