Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here. There’s been some commentary the past couple of days regarding a potential Windows Vista virus and we wanted to weigh in with some details. First of all, in examining the details of the reports, there is no Windows Vista virus described in them. Instead, the reports are regarding potential proof of concept viruses in the form of malicious scripts that are developed to affect a new interactive shell codenamed "Monad", which is currently in early phase of beta testing...

Hey folks - Mike Reavey here. Next Tuesday is the 2nd Tuesday of the Month and I wanted to outline what bulletins we expect to release. At the moment we have 6 security bulletins planned for release, the highest severity rating of these is Critical. We're also continuing to release our Malicious Software Removal tool with updates for additional malware families. Finally, we have one non-security release that will be High-Priority on Microsoft and Windows Update. This non-security release is important...

Ok, earlier this morning we activated our Software Security Incident Reponse Process to respond to a malicious attack known as Worm:Win32/Zotob.A. Our investigation has determined that only a small number of customers have been affected and we're working directly with them. We have seen no indication of widespread impact to the Internet, but we have posted a guidance page as well as an encyclopedia entry on this attack. We will remain watchful for any variants or any further customer impact. As...

An article on Slashdot is saying that Monad was pulled from Windows Vista due to the virus story. This is 100% incorrect. One had nothing to do with the other. Monad is probably going to be a longer term project than Windows Vista, and we didn't just decide to remove it today or yesterday. Just wanted to clarify that. S. *This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here. We now have reports of an attack against the MS05-039 vulnerability. We have updated our security advisory located at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/899588.mspx To provide our initial information and guidance. More information shortly. S. *This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

What a crazy 24 hours. We have now re-released MS05-038, the IE bulletin, as version 2.0. We have pushed out the updates to the Download Center with the digital signature issue resolved. If you got your updates from Windows Update, Microsoft Update, WSUS, or SUS yesterday you have nothing to worry about. For you admins out there the binaries and install are all the same so need to change any detection you may have worked up. Here’s what happened: During the publication of the MS05-038 updates...

Hi everyone, Mike Reavey here. I wanted to take a moment and blog live from our MSRC Situation Room. (those of you watching CNN this morning got a glimpse of it!) The Situation Room is a dedicated room inside the Microsoft campus. When there is a problem or an attack impacting customers, we bring all of the right people into that room to work on the problem. That means at any given time during an incident there’s lot of people, a lot of empty coke cans, and a lot of pizza boxes. Sometimes there’s...

Hey folks – Mike Reavey here, live from the situation room. (BTW- “live from the situation room” is a new favorite term ever since our big television debut this week!) I wanted to let you know that we published an advisory on a security issue in COM object, MSDDS.DLL, that when loaded in Internet Explorer could potentially run malicious code a system. The advisory is here . Some quick excerpts that are important for customers to know: · The Microsoft DDS Library Shape Control (Msdds.dll) does...

Hi everyone, Unfortunately it looks like someone has posted exploit code for MS05-039 publicly. Please be sure that you are deploying this update, Windows 2000 users are particularly at risk. We have posted a security advisory on this at the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/899588.mspx S. *This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Hi everyone, Debby Fry Wilson here. Just wanted to talk a little bit about a security advisory we have released today just as a precaution. There's been a lot of concern about MS05-039 because of the recent attacks against unpatched Windows 2000 systems. On operating systems like Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003, any attack trying to exploit MS05-039 would have to be local to the computer, and could not travel automatically across a network unless the attacker was already at the...