Oh dear…Another bug in IE ? This piece of software (internet explorer) is such a black sheep in the browser market. Expect a patch out on next month’s Patch Tuesday..

Microsoft has warned people about another unpatched security hole, which could let hackers take control of an affected computer. The vulnerability, affects ActiveX control, and can affect users of Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, on Windows XP Service Pack 1, and on Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Looks like Microsoft Live Search is no more a test tube baby…Its been released official to beat the G out of Google…Good luck to them…Their MSN search had a lot of spam in the heydays back in the 90s. I know..I was from that era..I still find the Microsoft Live Search a bit too slow for my taste. How can they ever try to beat Google’s searching hardware that’s been dubbed the largest collection of open source servers.

Software giant Microsoft has launched the new Live.com search service in its ongoing battle to beat the mighty Google. The search engine has been in beta testing for several months and features the streamlined look of Google’s popular homepage.

Official launch of Microsoft Live Search

For economic reasons since Microsoft’s DRM is used by music online stores, they’ve patched a bug in their DRM system ASAP and no one was the wiser….except the crackers that came out with the FairUse4WM already have a patch to patch big blue’s patch. Haha. This is the start of a very bad patch war….may the best prevail.

Last week, a hacker developed FairUse4WM to strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files. If it were a Windows problem, it might have waited until the next monthly patch Tuesday to be fixed, at the earliest. However, since this one will cause ructions with the music business, Microsoft has apparently made it a priority to issue a new patch straight away.

Oh darn. Here’s another one of those zero day bugs that gets pretty sneaky dropping Trojans all over your PC when you open an infected MS Word file. Be very careful as you might leave backdoors on your PC….Take heed indeed..Let’s hope Microsoft will release a patch for this on the next Patch Day - Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006.

Symantec’s researchers said that they’d analyzed a sample of the in-the-wild attack and confirmed that it worked against a fully-patched edition of Office 2000 — Word 2000 is one of the applications bundled with that version of the Office suite — running on a fully-patched Windows 2000 machine.

“Although we have not been able to exploit other versions of Office with this specific sample, others may be affected by the vulnerability,” Symantec said in an alert issued to customers of its DeepSight threat system. The Cupertino, Calif.-based security vendor characterized the exploit as “reliable” and added that it was “mostly transparent to an end-user.”

If a Word 2000 user opens the malicious document attached to the attacker’s e-mail message, a Trojan horse drops another file onto the computer; that file (actually another Trojan) drops yet another file, this time a backdoor component which leaves the machine open to additional attack or misuse.