This report is a very interesting read. It discusses recent trends and data collected around viruses, malware, exploits, etc. Some of the conclusions:
"Disclosed vulnerabilities for 2006 rose 41 percent over the previous year, continuing an upward trend in new vulnerability disclosures. More vulnerabilities were disclosed in the second half of 2006 than in any single year from 2000 to 2004."
"A much larger percentage of vulnerabilities were "complex to exploit" than in previous years, supporting the observation that the security researcher industry is maturing and utilizing better tools and techniques to find more complex issues."
"Application vulnerabilities continued to grow relative to operating system vulnerabilities as a percentage of all disclosures during 2006, supporting the observation that security vulnerability researchers may be focusing more on applications than in the past."
Here's a link to the report.
Beta 2 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager was posted to connect.microsoft.com last night. Here is the link. Some highlights from the connect site:
What is Virtual Machine Manager?
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 is a server application used to manage a virtualized data center running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and R2 SP1. Virtual Machine Manager is tightly integrated in the System Center family of products, and together these products provide comprehensive management of physical and virtual environments.
Where can I find more information about Virtual Machine Manager?
Documentation for Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 can be found on the connect.microsoft.com Web site, which requires Windows Live ID authentication. For Beta 2, the following resources are available:
· Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 System Requirements (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69926)
· Virtual Machine Manager Planning and Deployment Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69927)
What's new in Beta 2?
You can read about the new features in SCVMM Beta 2 at (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=87357).
Longhorn Beta 3 has been released and is available at the link below. This is a major milestone obviously and is essentially feature complete. I'm looking forward to testing some of the key feautures such as Server Core, Read-Only Domain Controller, and especially all the new Terminal Services feaures such as TS Gateway and TS Remote Programs. I've been doing a lot of work and demos with Terminal Server on Beta 2 that customers have been very positive about.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/longhorn/audsel.mspx
Lots of good press coming out of Mix. I was able to catch the keynote webcast. It was great to hear from Ray Ozzie in some depth about his vision for the future of software plus services. Even internally unless you're on some of those teams the news has been pretty sparse. I like the fact that virtually everything they announced is available at least in beta to test and most is scheduled to be completed before the year's end. No vaporware here. Stepping back a little to take it all in, these announcements are very significant for the light they shed on the future. Cross platform. Cloud based services. Rich user experiences. APIs everywhere. For as huge a company as Microsoft is, the amount of change and new products in the last 18 months is incredible.
Here is some of the best coverage so far:
http://visitmix.com/ - The official site, lots of content and the session videos should be up here within a day or two
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=356 - Best overall summary so far compliments of Ryan Stewart
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2007/04/30/announcing-net-framework-support-for-silverlight.aspx - Good commentary from Jason Zander
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/04/30/a-conversation-with-john-lam-about-the-dynamic-language-runtime-silverlight-and-ruby/ - Jon Udell article and podcast