Happy New Year to everyone. As Bill noted in his posting on Thursday , we are releasing one new bulletin today, MS09-001 . This bulletin is rated as ‘Critical’ for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and is rated as ‘Moderate’ for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. My colleague Mark Wodrich has put together a posting over at the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense (SVRD) weblog which explains more about the vulnerability and the Exploitability Index rating. Also, as...

Hello, Bill here. I wanted to let you know that we just posted our Advance Notification for next week’s bulletin release which will occur on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009 around 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. It is important to remember that while the information posted below is intended to help with your planning, because it is preliminary information, it is subject to change. As part of our regularly scheduled bulletin release, we’re currently planning to release one security bulletin: ...

Hi, Bill here, In response to continued customer questions on how to protect and defend themselves against the Conficker Worm, I wanted to let you know the Microsoft Malware Protection Center has published a Threat Research and Response Blog that centralizes Microsoft’s guidance. This will help you understand the nature of the threat and enable you to formulate a defense in depth strategy based on the aspects of your unique environment s . The blog is posted here . We continue to encourage...

Hi, During this month’s webcast we were able to address 21 questions in the time allotted. We addressed several questions regarding MS09-001 and its relationship to previously released SMB bulletins. There were also questions regarding update deployment and attack vectors addressed. The remaining questions primarily concerned the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) update regarding the W32/Conficker worm. Here is the link to the full Q&A so you can see all of the answers that were...