Microsoft Security Intelligence Briefing Delivered at Infosecurity Europe

Microsoft's second-half 2006 Security Intelligence Report, discussed at the vendor's press briefing on Tuesday 25th April, follows on from its first-half 2006 predecessor, incorporating the earlier data in an attempt to show trends. The overall picture has not changed much despite a few vulnerabilities specific to second-half 2006 showing up in the data. A useful departure in the current report, however, is the inclusion of breakdowns of vulnerabilities by severity, complexity of exploitation, and relation to operating system or other software.

Of greater interest is the announcement of Microsoft's new security web portal, titled the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. This is currently in preview and is expected to go fully live in July. The preview portal lists top ten malware in prioritised lists under various categories, together with a keyword search into the malware archive and links to related Microsoft resources. The information is mostly quite technical and therefore unlikely to be accessible to ordinary users, but does not delve deeper than the level of detail generally published by specialist anti-virus vendors. Although it may be somewhat unfair to judge a preview site, it is not clear that this portal offers very much more than is already available from numerous existing sources.

See also:

• The Microsoft Malware Protection Center, the vendor's new security portal

(mba)