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Announcement: security bulletin MS10-087 update for Microsoft Office

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center has a post noting security bulletin MS10-087, which addresses a number of critical vulnerabilities in how Microsoft Office parses various office file formats. This was addressed in November, in the MS10-087 update.

One of them is CVE-2010-3333, “RTF Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability,” which could lead to remote code execution via specially crafted RTF data. A few days before Christmas, we received a new sample (sha1: cc47a73118c51b0d32fd88d48863afb1af7b2578) that reliably exploits this vulnerability and is able to execute malicious shellcode which downloads other malware.

If you use Microsoft Office, you may install the update via Windows Update (aka WU): go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ to learn more about how to use WU. You can launch WU by clicking the Start button on your Windows computer, then click All Programs and select Windows Update.

 

Tags: Microsoft, how to, customer support, customer service, Microsoft Office.

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Announcement: Microsoft Windows December 2010 Updates to Daylight Saving Time and Time Zones

Check out Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 2443685, “December 2010 cumulative time zone update for Windows operating systems”, which the Windows team just posted.  This is the December Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone (DST & TZ) Cumulative Update (CU), and the current KB/blog text focuses on the less common changes, such as adding the timezone for Magadan. 
 
The good folks in Windows (thanks, KC) provided some additional commentary and clarifications to the posts…

  1. Explaining that the Namibia DST support changes begin in 2011
  2. Listing other regions with dynamic support which get routine annual updates

The December 2010 DST Cumulative Update for Windows operating systems focuses on the following changes:

Magadan

  • A new timezone has been created for Magadan. The Magadan timezone has support for Daylight Saving Time, with 2011 DST running from March to October.
  • The existing timezone “(UTC +11:00) Magadan, Solomon Islands, New Caldonia” has been renamed “(UTC +11:00) Solomon Islands, New Caledonia”.   This is only a  displayname update – the rules for this timezone have not changed. As before, this timezone does not have DST support.
Namibia: The offset has been changed from UTC +2:00 to UTC +1:00. In addition, for 2011 and forward, the DST start date will occur in September, and the DST end date will occur in April.
Egypt :  the 2011 DST start date is set to occur in April and the DST end-date is set to occur in September. This is provided to address cases in which 2010 Fix-its for temporary DST changes were only partially applied.
In addition to these changes, the December DST CU contains 2011 adjusted DST start and end-dates for the following timezones:
·    Israel Standard Time
·    Morocco Standard Time
·    Pacific SA Standard Time
·    Samoa Standard Time
·    Syria Standard Time
For more information on these adjustments, refer to this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2443685 
The following blogs have been updated  – the KB updates are coming :

For more information about how daylight saving time changes may affect other Microsoft products, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 914387  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387/ ) How to configure daylight saving time for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

A holiday nod of thanks to the good folks across our company working on our effort to help manage time (particularly in daylight saving time and time zone changes) — documented and followed at http://www.microsoft.com/time and over at the blog at http://blogs.technet.com/dst2007 — and to the folks coordinating the efforts on our daylight saving time and time zone updates and releases for current products across the various product groups at Microsoft.  As noted, this is a tough job, to say the least.

Tags: Windows, Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST; 18,600,000 (up a bunch from just six months ago); 18,800,000 (down ~2M)

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Did you win £450,000 in a “Microsoft Lottery”? Think again: it’s a phishing attempt

MC910216371[1]I was asked today…

I received a message in my email on behalf of Microsoft from the National Lottery International [stating] "A certificate of winning and other certificates including your winning cheque of Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand Great Britain Pound Sterlings has been sent to us by the claims officer of overseas Winner of the Microsoft National Lottery."

Is this real?

Nope, sorry… See this post at http://spamemailgraveyard.com/2010/04/microsoft-notification.html.

As I noted in my prior post, "Did you win One Million Euros in a Microsoft Lottery? Think again: it’s a phishing attempt", a lottery scam is a common phishing scam known as advanced fee fraud. One of the most common forms of advanced fee fraud is a message that claims that you have won a large sum of money, or that a person will pay you a large sum of money for little or no work on your part. The lottery scam often includes references to big companies, such as Microsoft.

In short: there is no Microsoft lottery.

For more information on how to protect yourself from fraudulent emails, please see Microsoft’s Anti-Phishing Site, and my posts on Phishing: Don’t get caught and FYI: new scams featuring the IRS logo to get your PII.

Other related links and resources…

*Tip from the Microsoft Anti-Phishing site: To see updated examples of popular phishing scams or to report a possible phishing scam, visit the Anti-Phishing Working Group Archive.

Tags: Microsoft, your questions, email, phishing, Security.

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Samoa adopts daylight saving time in 2010, but why at midnite?

I read in the Samoa Observer, and in case you missed the original news, Samoa will implement daylight saving time this September… MC900189348[1]

"…in response to the need for national strategies to address the crises with fuel and food prices. This new and exciting change will come into force on Friday night Saturday morning 25th September 2010 adjusting clocks forward 12:00am (0000Hrs) to 1:00am (0100Hrs) readjusting it back one hour from 1:00am (0100Hrs) to 12:00am (0000Hrs) on Friday night Saturday morning 2nd April 2011.

"Enquiries on daylight saving can be made to the Fair Trading and Codex Division of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Labour on the 4th Floor of the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC House), Apia, or its Telephone 20441."

More details may be found here: http://www.sits.ws/Home/tabid/1306/mid/6724/newsid6724/175/Samoas-Daylight-Saving-Starts-in-September-2010/language/en-NZ/Default.aspx

I wonder: do we have an office in Samoa? (Answer: no, but I think our offices in New Zealand may work with the nation.)

My concern here is the midnite change.

Here’s my regular advice for governments: in support of these types of changes, we provide guidance and Microsoft’s Policy in Response to DST/TZ Requests. It’s important for countries and territories to work towards seamless transitions to new DST and time zones policies, providing ample advance notice (of a year or more) with published confirmation of planned changes.

In addition – and this is important – we suggest that entities considering moves to DST implement changes at the next clock tick after 01:59:59 rather than at 00:00:00. Making the change at midnight can impact daily scheduled system events that sometimes occur at 12:00 midnite, such as back ups, data pulls or other automated tasks.

Apparently, I need to send out a few more emails to our folks in Public Sector.

 

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS,DST, Samoa

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Public Beta Now Available for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

In case you missed Brandon’s post yesterday, the public beta is now available for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1…

Today, we announced at our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) the availability of the public beta for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). As Gavriella Schuster and I have mentioned in previous blogs, SP1 for Windows 7 does not contain any new features specific to Windows 7. However, the new features in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 benefit Windows 7 by providing a richer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) experience. For Windows 7, SP1 is simply a combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners. For more information on Windows 7 SP1 and new features for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, I recommend reading this blog post from the Windows Server Division Weblog.

If you are an IT Professional interested in testing Windows 7 SP1, you can download the public beta via the Springboard Series on TechNet where you will find the download as well as other key deployment and support tools. For everyone else, Windows 7 SP1 will be available in the first half of 2011 through the usual channels.

Tags: Microsoft, articles, blogs, Microsoft, Windows 7

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, Windows 7, computers, how-to

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