It appears that Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives sold after August to be infected with a virus. Yes, off the shelf brand new hard discs could carry a potential security threat.

Following findings by the Investigation Bureau that portable hard discs produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology that were sold in Taiwan contained Trojan horse viruses, further investigations suggested that "contamination" took place when the products were in the hands of Chinese subcontractors during the manufacturing process.

On Nov. 6. Microsoft released in New York and Los Angeles, the new generation of Windows Live services available in 36 languages and 59 countries across the globe.Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Live business group pointed out the three most important aspects that Windows Live aims at :the user oriented policy, making Microsoft a truly integrated and wide experience and delivering through Windows the best Web has to offer.

A recent Microsoft special security advisory warns about the great threat that a newly discovered flaw in a driver on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP lies ahead According to the announcement, this flaw which is being investigated with Macrovision would enable a total system takeover.

Bit9, Inc., a leading provider of application control and device control solutions, today released its annual list of the top popular applications with known vulnerabilities. Often running outside of IT's knowledge or control, these popular applications can be difficult to detect and remove.

The list, published as a research brief entitled "2007's Popular Applications with Critical Vulnerabilities" was designed to help IT departments regain control over their desktop environments. Or was it to know which apps you should pack on your portable USB tool collection :) ?

Despite having frequent Vista quarrels in the past, Symantec and Microsoft join forces to build a forum aimed at promoting security best practice

Announced at the RSA Conference Europe 2007 on Tuesday, Symantec and Microsoft will join the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SafeCode), which claims to be a not-for-profit organization aimed at increasing trust around IT. Other members include EMC, SAP and Juniper Networks.

Microsoft acknowledges that they are to blame for the latest wave of PDF attacks. Since there is a public exploit which takes advantage of a Windows vulnerability trough an Adobe Reader flaw, here has been an intense debate over who's to blame in this case. Adobe quickly acknowledged the flaw and issued a patch as described in the Security Bulletin no. APSB07-18:

A new malware that imitates Skype is out there and collects personal information from the infected hosts. The windows Skype community has reported the wide spread of 65404-SkypeDefenderSetup.exe which is classified as an Infostealer, that is, a Trojan horse program that attempts to steal sensitive information such as login credentials.

Last week, Microsoft released its monthly security update cycle which contained six security updates and one re-release.Nothing new so far, except that one of those six security updates has been labeled CRITICAL by Microsoft and it affects all Windows versions since Windows 2000 up to Vista.

It's Outlook Express that got fried.

If you were using a pirated copy of Windows XP, you can bypass Windows Genuine Advantage authentication if you want to install Internet Explorer 7.

In a desperate effort to push it's own browser against Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft is giving Internet Explorer 7 for free.

The following content covers some of the most usual windows security problems and their solution. You don't have to be an uber geeks ecurity guru in order to master Windows Security . We mean it!  Check out the following links to see The best (and really funny :) Windows security stuff