Today we are providing advance notification to customers that we will be releasing two bulletins this month affecting Windows and Microsoft Office products. Both bulletins are rated Important and address a total of 8 vulnerabilities.

We recommend that customers review the Advance Notification webpage and prepare to deploy these bulletins as soon as possible. To provide additional guidance for deployment prioritization, customers should note that both bulletins will address issues that would require a user to open a specially crafted file. There are no network based attack vectors.

We’re also continuing to monitor the situation with Security Advisory 981169, the VBScript issue disclosed on Monday. There are no known attacks but we encourage customers to review the advisory and apply the suggested workarounds where possible. Customers that are running Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Vista are not affected.

As always, we will be hosting a public webcast where we will go in to details about the bulletins for March and where customers can ask questions. We will have a room full of engineers on hand to answer those questions live during the webcast. Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday, March 10
Time: 11:00 a.m. PST (UTC -8)
Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032427711

A couple of months ago, I started including information about products that are reaching the end of their product lifecycle. It is extremely important for customers to move to supported platforms because after the dates below, those products/service packs, will no longer receive security updates.

  • Windows XP Service Pack 2 will no longer be supported after July 13, 2010. Many customers are still on this version, so we encourage upgrading to Service Pack 3 or to Windows 7 as soon as possible.
  • Windows Vista RTM will no longer be supported after April 13, 2010. Service Pack 1 will still be supported until July 12, 2011 but we recommend customers update to Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 at this time.
  • Extended support for Windows 2000 will also be retired as of July 13, 2010. After that time, we will no longer provide security or any other updates for Windows 2000.

Hope to see you at the webcast!

Jerry Bryant
Sr. Security Communications Manager Lead

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*