Archive for October, 2006

A contingent from our antimalware team attended the Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, Canada two weeks ago- 12 of us in all.  Matt Braverman and I were both presenters and I also moderated a panel discussing progress made by the Anti-Spyware Coalition. 

My paper entitled "I Know What You Did Last Logon" was a look into monitoring software from the perspective of privacy and the boundaries of appropriate versus inappropriate use for such technology.  I examined this from several angles including a discussion of several court cases that illustrate both sides of the discussion.  I also drilled into several pieces of malware for a more detailed discussion of the technical methods employed by monitoring software.

Matt's paper, entitled "Behavioral Modeling of Social Engineering-Based Malicious Software" focuses on malware that leverages social engineering to infect a computer. It reviews techniques used both in the past and present and uses up-to-date data from the MSRT to differentiate those social engineering techniques which have been particularly successful. For example, we've found that using "generic conversation" techniques in an email seems to be one of the most effective ways to attract a user to executing an attachment to that email. Such techniques usually leverage short email subjects and bodies (e.g. "Here is that document you asked for") to try and replicate conversations that may have occurred "in real life" between the email recipient and the sender which the email may spoof.

Copies of both papers are now available through the download center, let us know what you think.

-- Jeff Williams
Security Research & Response

Our colleagues on the mobile team just finished work on the Live.com Beta for mobile, and we've been very impressed with the results. If you've ever wanted to use Live.com from anywhere, this is the product you've been waiting for!

The gadgets (weather, stock and horoscope) and RSS feeds you set up on your first personalized Live.com page will travel with you, which means you can get the same news and blogs that you read on Live.com wherever you are. Simply point the browser on your mobile device to http://mobile.live.com/ and follow the links to the “Live.com Beta.”

The Live.com Beta for mobile also provides super easy access to other mobile Windows Live services such as your Windows Live Mail inbox, or Windows Live Spaces  simply by using the Service bar, which features the product icons and can be found right below the search bar.

         

Since it's in beta, the team really needs your feedback to help create a better product. Give it a whirl the next time you are out and about with a little down time – on a bus, in a waiting room, at a flight’s departure gate, virtually anywhere... and let the mobile team know your thoughts by using this form: http://feedback.live.com/eform.aspx?productkey=wlcommobile&mkt=en-us

You can learn more about the beta at ideas.live.com and check out the team's blog at itsallmobile.spaces.live.com to find out more about what they're up to.

This week at RSA Europe in Nice, France we released a report detailing the security landscape for the first half of 2006. The report lays out details collected through our various antimalware technologies. The report highlights a number of trends such as a reduction in the number of rootkits and trojans detected by the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) compared to the second half of 2005, social engineering as a popular and successful method of malware distribution, the frequency that specific potentially unwanted software is kept or removed and specific locales which have the highest instance of infection.

Some of the key points we think our readers will be interested in are:

• Threats against consumers and businesses are continuing to become more targeted and motivated by financial gain, with backdoor Trojans and bots continuing to comprise a significant percentage of the malicious software detected by Microsoft anti-malware offerings;
• Social engineering continues to be a popular means of spreading malware, especially when sent over e-mail and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks;
• Rootkits are likely to continue to be popular for targeted, stealth intrusions.

The data used to identify these trends comes primarily from the Malicious Software Removal Tool and Windows Defender as well as Windows Live OneCare, Windows Live One Care safety scanner, and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering. In the six months covered by the report these tools cleaned nearly 27 million pieces of malware or potentially unwanted software and blocked hundreds of millions of infected email messages.

Based on the data we analyzed and trends observed we also make specific recommendations for how you can better protect the systems that you manage.

You can find the full report here. We welcome your feedback.

Matt Braverman, Jeff Williams & Ziv Mador

Our colleagues on the mobile team just finished work on the Live.com Beta for mobile, and we've been very impressed with the results. If you've ever wanted to use Live.com from anywhere, this is the product you've been waiting for!

The gadgets (weather, stock and horoscope) and RSS feeds you set up on your first personalized Live.com page will travel with you, which means you can get the same news and blogs that you read on Live.com wherever you are. Simply point the browser on your mobile device to http://mobile.live.com/ and follow the links to the “Live.com Beta.”

The Live.com Beta for mobile also provides super easy access to other mobile Windows Live services such as your Windows Live Mail inbox, or Windows Live Spaces  simply by using the Service bar, which features the product icons and can be found right below the search bar.

         

Since it's in beta, the team really needs your feedback to help create a better product. Give it a whirl the next time you are out and about with a little down time – on a bus, in a waiting room, at a flight’s departure gate, virtually anywhere... and let the mobile team know your thoughts by using this form: http://feedback.live.com/eform.aspx?productkey=wlcommobile&mkt=en-us

You can learn more about the beta at ideas.live.com and check out the team's blog at itsallmobile.spaces.live.com to find out more about what they're up to.

It's been a hectic week.

Between getting thrown in a fountain (that's my boss, Group Program Manager of IE, but almost everyone went in at some point), and being filmed for Channel 9 video (say hi to Arvind, Will and Cindy, about half of the RSS test team), I forgot to post a note here. But, I figured that most people had probably heard that IE7 for XP (including the Windows RSS Platform) shipped last Wednesday.

But, in case you haven't... Dean Hachamovitch (GM of IE) has a post over on the IEBlog that covers all of the goodness that's in IE7. There's some good information on how to give feedback and get support, and the plans for Automatic Update distribution of IE7.

Now that the week is over, I'm taking a minute to reflect. Building IE7's RSS features and the Windows RSS Platform have been a great ride all of us on the RSS team. More importantly, it is abundantly clear that we could not have done it without the feedback and comments from all of you (anyone remember the icon posts?).

So, on behalf of the whole team: thank you.

As Dean said in his post, we have already started work on plans for the next version of Internet Explorer (which includes, of course, plans for the next version of the IE RSS features and the Windows RSS platform). So, feel free to use the comments on this post to let us know what RSS features are on the top of your must-see list for the next release.

Thanks again,
Sean

This Widget uses SpeedFan, a popular utility, to display your processor temperature simply and concisely.

[Editor's Note] SpeedFan requires quite a bit of configuration before this Widget works correctly. You will need to turn on the logging feature and choose what is written in the log before launching the Widget.


Version History
Version 4.0
Completely rewritten parsing engine solves most of the problems users have with 2.0, plus it is a lot easier to set up and configure!