Summary: A group of new links about Microsoft security and reliability going terribly wrong

● Prevx blames Microsoft for black screen down (also see: Eye on Microsoft: A Black Screen of Death Ahead of Microsoft's Results)

Microsoft’s most recent release of security patches is causing some computers to freeze and display a, er, black screen of death.

The glitch is affecting Windows 7, Vista and XP operating systems, according to software security firm Prevx.

[...]

Microsoft’s latest modification to ACL registry keys have rendered some installed apps as useless, by preventing them from running and causing a black screen to appear.

● New Bios attack renders anti-virus useless

A new form of attack that installs a rootkit directly onto a computer's Bios system would render anti-virus software useless, researchers have warned.

● Jose Nazario on Botnets and the History of DDoS Attacks [via, reader's comment: "no mention of the Microsoft Windows root botnet"]

Over the course of a few days in February 2000, a lone hacker was able to bring some of the Web's larger sites to their knees, using just a few dozen machines and some relatively primitive software to cripple Yahoo, eBay, E*trade, Amazon, ZDnet and others for hours at a time. No one knew it at the time, but these attacks would come to be seen in later years as some of the earlier outbreaks of what has become a massive online pandemic.