Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here. There is a lot of activity happening within the MSRC this week so I wanted to make sure that, in addition to the guidance we’ve put out around the WMF vulnerability, that we also let you know that we’ve issued a security advisory regarding recent variants of the Win32/Sober worm. To be clear, these are separate and unrelated issues, however getting guidance out to customers is equally important when customers are faced with any sort of malicious threat. The...

Mike Reavey here from the MSRC- I just wanted to provide another quick update on the WMF vulnerability situation. Microsoft is continuing to work on finalizing a security update for the vulnerability in WMF that is currently being exploited by some malicious attackers. The update has been on an expedited track since Microsoft became aware of the attacks on December 27th. We still anticipate releasing the security fix for this issue on January 10, 2006, once testing for quality and application compatibility...

Hi folks- Kevin Kean here again. We here in the MSRC have been hard at work on this WMF vulnerability and so I wanted to provide you all with an update on the situation. When the MSRC learned of the attacks on December 27, 2005, we mobilized under what we call the Software Security Incident Response Process (SSIRP) to analyze the attack, assess its scope and determine and the appropriate guidance for customers, as well as to engage with anti-virus partners and law enforcement. Based on...

Hi folks- this is Kevin Kean from the MSRC, writing what may just be my last MSRC blog entry for 2005. This morning we noticed that there are some people who are still looking for more information about the Windows Metafile (WMF) vulnerability that we issued a security advisory for on Wednesday. I thought it would be helpful to let you all know what we know about this and what we are doing to take care of it. Since earlier this week, my team has been hard at work investigating this vulnerability...

Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here. Just wanted to make everyone is aware that this evening the MSRC posted a security advisory regarding a possible vulnerability affecting the Graphics Rendering Engine in Windows. The MSRC has made some additional information and guidance available to customers which you can read more about here . S. *This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Hi everyone, Stephen Toulouse here. We've released the script to help address the SUS 1.0 issue Craig mentioned earlier to the download center. We've also updated the KB article that details the problem, click here to zoom straight to the section on the new script that is available. S. *This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Hi everyone. One tired Release Manager Craig here. Today we released 2 new bulletins, details below. But a quick note: For the SUS 1.0 Admins, you may be experiencing some problems with all your previously approved updates are now showing up as “unapproved”. This doesn’t impact the update level of your SUS clients, or the ability to deploy today’s updates with SUS 1.0. However, we have released a KB that has more details and workarounds . We are also hoping to make it a bit easier to fix by releasing...

Stephen Toulouse here gang. The Advance Notification for the security bulletin release for this month has posted. This coming Tuesday, we’re planning to release two security bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The maximum total severity rating for this month is Critical, so please update systems as soon as possible when the bulletins are available this coming Tuesday. The updates can be deployed and detected with MBSA, Windows Update, Microsoft Update, SUS and WSUS etc. There will also be a new...

We've received some questions regarding a reported cross-site scripting (XSS) issue affecting Internet Explorer. Google Desktop was used in a proof of concept to demonstrate how, in some cases, this issue could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information. This issue may be a bit confusing because it is not really an XSS issue. A better way to describe it might be to call it “cross-site information disclosure”. Our investigation indicates that this issue will have limited impact because an effective...

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on my IT Forum update recapping our trip to Barcelona . But I wanted to go ahead and let you know some breaking information. We’ve been made aware that there has been some malicious software exploiting the recently publicly disclosed Internet Explorer vulnerability. We have just updated our security advisory to reflect this new information, and wanted to let you know that you can visit Windows Live Safety Center if you think you might be infected as a result of this...