Security

Microsoft cuts off Security Essentials downloads

Less than a day later

Cade Metz Wed 24 Jun 2009 // 17:48 UTC

Redmond has cut off access to its Microsoft Security Essentials beta, less than a day after offering the free security app to John Q. Public on a first-come, first-served basis.

"Thank you for your interest in joining the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta," reads a post to the MSE website. "We are not accepting additional participants at this time. Please check back at later a date [sic] for possible additional availability."

Developed under the codename "Morro," Microsoft Security Essentials is the successor to Redmond's discontinued OneCare service, but it's more limited. The free service provides protection against computer viruses, spyware, and rootkits, while omitting OneCore's backup and firewall tools.

The beta was offered up to 75,000 folks running XP, Vista, or Windows 7 machines. The Security Essentials site offered downloads to the US, Brazil, and Israel. In UK, downloads were available to others through Microsoft Connect.

A final version of the product is expected in September. In early tests, the service has received a thumbs up from independent testing lab AV-test.org. ®

Update: Story has been updated to clarify where beta downloads were available.

Similar topics

Microsoft

Broader topics

Bill Gates

Narrower topics

Corrections Send us news

Other stories you might like

How to explain what an API is – and why they matter

Some of us have used them for decades, some are seeing them for the first time on marketing slides

Bruce Davie Wed 25 May 2022 // 09:30 UTC

Systems Approach Explaining what an API is can be surprisingly difficult.
It's striking to remember that they have been around for about as long as we've had programming languages, and that while the "API economy" might be a relatively recent term, APIs have been enabling innovation for decades. But how to best describe them to someone for whom application programming interfaces mean little or nothing?
I like this short video from Martin Casado, embedded below, which starts with the analogy of building cars. In the very early days, car manufacturers were vertically integrated businesses, essentially starting from iron ore and coal to make steel all the way through to producing the parts and then the assembled vehicle. As the business matured and grew in size, car manufacturers were able to buy components built by others, and entire companies could be created around supplying just a single component, such as a spring.

Continue reading
Microsoft veteran on how he forged a badge to sneak into a Ballmer presentation

Developers, developers... and top secret coffee machines. Security at MS is definitely tighter 25 years later

Richard Speed Wed 25 May 2022 // 08:30 UTC

Former Microsoft staffer Dave Plummer has revealed how he managed to sneak his wife into a corporate event so that she might experience a Steve Ballmer presentation first hand. The old romantic.
Speaking on his Dave's Garage YouTube channel, Plummer detailed the fights of yesteryear between engineers and those that sought to keep things secure. His own example took the form of a desire to get his wife into one of Microsoft's corporate events.
Who, after all, would not want to sit among throngs of eager employees, awaiting pearls of wisdom to drop from the mouths of the execs? Or, as Plummer put it, "witness Steve's [Ballmer] insanity and Bill's [Gates] vision."

Continue reading
Quad nations pledge deeper collaboration on infosec, data-sharing, and more

But think tank says its past attempts at working together haven't gone well

Laura Dobberstein Wed 25 May 2022 // 07:57 UTC

Leaders of the Quad alliance – Australia, India, Japan, and the USA – met on Tuesday and revealed initiatives to strengthen collaboration on emerging technologies and cybersecurity, with an unspoken subtext of neutralizing China.
"Today, we – prime minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, prime minister Narendra Modi of India, prime minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, and president Joe Biden of the United States – convene in Tokyo to renew our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient," declared the Quad in a very formal statement.
The nations also stated they "strongly oppose any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo and increase tensions in the area."

Continue reading

About half of popular websites tested found vulnerable to account pre-hijacking

In detail: Ocean's Eleven-grade ruse in which victims' profiles are rigged from the start

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 25 May 2022 // 07:28 UTC

Two security researchers have identified five related techniques for hijacking internet accounts by preparing them to be commandeered in advance.
And they claim that when they analyzed 75 popular internet services, almost half were vulnerable to at least one of these techniques.
Avinash Sudhodanan, an independent security researcher, and Andrew Paverd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, describe their findings in a paper titled, "Pre-hijacked accounts: An Empirical Study of Security Failures in User Account Creation on the Web."

Continue reading
Indian stock markets given ten day deadline to file infosec report, secure board signoff

Another rush job for busy Indian IT shops

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 25 May 2022 // 06:53 UTC

Indian IT shops have been handed another extraordinarily short deadline within which to perform significant infosec work.
This time the source of the edict is the Securities and Exchange Board of India, which on May 20 published a modified version of the "Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience framework" that applies to market infrastructure institutions (MIIs) – or stock exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories – that it published in 2015.
Among the modifications, equipment rated "critical" and therefore subject to regular security review and testing has been expanded to any internet-facing application, and any system that stores personally identifiable information. Anything that interacts with other critical systems for operations or maintenance is now also classified as critical.

Continue reading
AI-designed COVID-19 drug nominated for preclinical trial

Treatment could stop coronavirus from replicating inside body

Katyanna Quach Wed 25 May 2022 // 06:23 UTC

An oral medication designed by scientists with the help of AI algorithms could one day treat patients with COVID-19 and other types of diseases caused by coronaviruses.
Insilico Medicine, a biotech startup based in New York, announced on Tuesday it had nominated a drug candidate for preclinical trials – the stage before you start testing it on humans.
Today's mRNA vaccines boost the body's immunity to COVID-19 by aiding the generation of antibodies capable of blocking the virus's spike protein, stopping the bio-nasty from infecting cells. The small molecule developed by Insilico, however, is used to treat people already infected, and works by preventing the coronavirus from replicating.

Continue reading

ServiceNow ordered a year's worth of hardware to avoid supply chain hassles

CTO shares datacenter secrets with The Reg: NVMe, MariaDB, mid-range x86 CPUs, S3-alike, and more

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 25 May 2022 // 04:58 UTC

The tech world's pandemic supply chain meltdown drove ServiceNow to place orders for a year worth of datacenter kit in January 2022, believing that doing so was necessary to get the hardware it needed to cope with growing customer workloads.
"Pre-COVID, I could generally get stuff in 45 days," CTO Pat Casey told The Register at ServiceNow's Knowledge 22 conference in Sydney, Australia, today.
Well-publicized coronavirus-related supply challenges caused ServiceNow's lead time for some networking kit to stretch to 160 days, while servers can take 120 days to arrive.

Continue reading
Who had money on Samsung and Red Hat joining forces on next-gen memory software?

Cloudy server testbed coming, open source code filtering into RHEL promised

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 25 May 2022 // 02:14 UTC

Samsung and Red Hat have pledged to work together on developing software to get the best from emerging memory technologies.
The Korean giant points out that a bunch of storage and memory tech – NVMe SSDs, Compute Express Link, the combination of high-bandwidth memory and processing-in-memory, and data fabrics – all need enabling software if they are to work well with the kind of demanding applications they're promised to, well, enable.
The tech is likely to be used in different tiers, while sharing memory across devices is well and truly on the agenda as part of a renewed push for composable infrastructure.

Continue reading
How Intel can use its Granulate acquisition to maintain cloud dominance

Software-tuning suite could be used to show where and how Xeon trumps rivals, if customers can believe it

Dylan Martin Wed 25 May 2022 // 01:31 UTC

Analysis Intel is facing tough competition in the server CPU space, and one way it's trying to stand out — besides trying to make better chips — is its newly acquired Granulate cloud optimization software business that aims to improve application performance and reduce infrastructure costs.
The chipmaker has pitched its most recent software acquisition — which was announced in March and closed earlier this month — as a way to continuously optimize complex and older datacenter workloads for modern CPU cores without needing to make any code changes. This, according to Granulate, can help organizations reduce infrastructure costs by as much as 40-60 percent.
But in a presentation at the Intel Vision event, company representatives hinted at how Granulate's software could help the x86 giant defend its waning dominance in the cloud market.

Continue reading
Clearview AI wants its facial-recognition tech in banks, schools, etc

I get knocked down but I get up again, Italy, Canada, UK, ACLU, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter... are never gonna keep me down

Katyanna Quach Wed 25 May 2022 // 00:55 UTC

Clearview AI is reportedly expanding its facial-recognition services beyond law enforcement to include private industries, such as banking and education, amid mounting pressure from regulators, Big Tech, and privacy campaigners.
The New York-based startup's gigantic database contains more than 20 billion photos scraped from public social media accounts and websites. The database was used to train Clearview's software, which works by performing a face-matching algorithm between input images and ones stored on its database to identify individuals.
These images were downloaded without explicit permission from netizens or companies. Although Clearview has been sent numerous cease and desist letters from Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook and more, it continued to collect more images and grow its database. The demands to stop scraping public-facing webpages, however, were not legally binding, unlike the settlement agreement Clearview entered into to end its lawsuit against the American Civil Liberties Union.

Continue reading
Predator spyware sold with Chrome, Android zero-day exploits to monitor targets

Or so says Google after tracking 30+ vendors peddling surveillance malware

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle Tue 24 May 2022 // 23:58 UTC

Spyware vendor Cytrox sold zero-day exploits to government-backed snoops who used them to deploy the firm's Predator spyware in at least three campaigns in 2021, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).
The Predator campaigns relied on four vulnerabilities in Chrome (CVE-2021-37973, CVE-2021-37976, CVE-2021-38000 and CVE-2021-38003) and one in Android (CVE-2021-1048) to infect devices with the surveillance-ware.
Based on CitizenLab's analysis of Predator spyware, Google's bug hunters believe that the buyers of these exploits operate in Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Serbia, Spain, Indonesia, and possibly other countries.

Continue reading

ABOUT US

MORE CONTENT

SITUATION PUBLISHING

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

SIGN UP TO OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER

Security Scorecard

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022

Do not sell my personal information Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs