The past week has been a busy week in security for us in Ireland. Last Friday, we had Rafal Lukawiecki present at one of our events to coincide with the visit of Microsoft's CEO, Steve Balmer to Ireland as part of our 20th anniversary celebrations. This is the second time Rafal has presented to audiences in Ireland. Both times, the satisfaction scores for the events have been amazing. He obviously has a deep understanding of what he's presenting since he can it make so understandable - even for non-technical audience members. I have been to security presentations where the speakers have lost me in jargon within a few minutes. I always suspected that they resorted  to obsfucation (no pun intended) because they didn't really understand what they were talking about ( but maybe that's just me). If you haven't seen Rafal present, you can pick him up on recording at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/technet/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=18 .

The second big announcement of the week was that we are finally showing what we are doing with some of the technology that we have acquired over the past couple of years. We have now passed Antigen for Exchange, based on the Sybari technology we recently acquired, through the Security Development Lifecycle review process. This means that the product that will provide anti-spam and anti-virus protection for messaging and collaboration servers will be available in beta in the coming months. The second product announcement was Microsoft Client Protection that is designed to provide a one-stop shop for anti-spyware and anti-virus in a single package. The product won't be available until next year although their may be a beta in the next few months.

Finally, last Tuesday was Patch Tuesday. Three critical patches on Windows...four important and three moderate. If you haven't deployed the patches, you can get them from www.microsoft.com/security and folow the links.