It's likely that at least a few Microsoft employees had to work overtime in preparation for tomorrow's Patch Tuesday activities. The company's supposed to release 11 security bulletins in order to address 25 vulnerabilities, which may send signals about both its dedication to fixing stuff and the state of some popular software.
Microsoft plans to fix the 'F1' security bug that has been plaguing Internet Explorer users for six weeks in its monthly set of security patches tomorrow.
Microsoft's latest batch of patches contains a kernel update designed not to install on machines infected with a rootkit.
Microsoft has killed support for its unloved Windows Vista operating system today.
The company announced in February that the service pack-free version of its post-XP, pre-Windows 7 OS would hit end of life support in April.
This means that from today, the OS which hit manufacturers in late 2006 is left entirely at the mercy of hackers who might wish to exploit the now unsupported code.
Later today, Microsoft will play it safe by patching a Windows 7 bug that it says can't be exploited.
Of the 11 security bulletins that will be released in a few hours, "Bulletin 7" will address one or more vulnerabilities in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Once infected, compromised machines 'phone home' to hacker controlled servers in China.
Most antivirus vendors have patched their applications in order to detect the tampered archive file formats, such as ".rar," and ".zip," said Tomislav Pericin, founder of the commercial software protection project RLPack.
Some bogus files posing as games from Abel software attempt to trick victims into handing over personal information as part of a supposed game registration process. Meanwhile, in the background, the malware is collecting information on the victim's computer including domain, OS version, file use history and IE favourites.
In a blog post previewing a 13-month study on the prevalence of fake AVs on the Web, Google said that more than 11,000 individual domains were involved in the distribution of these scams. According to Google, that figure accounts for roughly 15 percent of all malicious software on the Internet.
China had about 7 million Internet Protocol (IP) addresses infected with Conficker B at the end of last year, according to a recent annual security report posted on the Web site of China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT). The number of infections varied during the second half of the year, which the report covered, but was higher than 5 million during all but one week.