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Volume seven of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIRv7) - part of Microsoft's commitment to providing an unparalleled level of security intelligence to help keep individuals and organizations better informed and to maximize security investments - was released today and there are a couple of tidbits in the report that caught my attention that I thought I would pass on. As a reminder, the SIR is published by Microsoft twice per year and looks at the data and trends observed in the first and second halves of each calendar year. The first thing that struck me while reading through the report is that for the first time, the SIR shares some high-level security best practices from countries that have consistently exhibited low malware infection. For example, Japan, Austria and Germany's infection rates remained relatively low during the first half of this year. So how do these regions keep their customers and resources safe from cyber threats? Japan's infection rates remain relatively low is due in large part to collaborations like the Cyber Clean Center. The Cyber Clean Center is a cooperative project between ISPs, major security vendors and Japanese government agencies aimed at educating users on how to keep their PCs infection free. Austria has implemented strict IT enforcement guidelines to lower piracy rates and this, along with strong ISP relationships and fast Internet lines, has helped ensure the ecosystem is kept up to date with security patches. Germany has also leveraged collaboration efforts with its CERT and ISP communities to help identify and raise awareness of botnet infections and, in some cases, quarantine infected computers. The other thing that stood out to me was the graph below. This graph shows the effectiveness of automatic updating and shows what happened to the trojan downloader family Win32/Renos once Microsoft released a signature update for Windows Defender via Windows Update and Microsoft Update. Within three days, enough computers had received the new signature update to reduce the error reports from 1.2 million per day to less than 100,000 per day worldwide! To me this shows how important it is for users and organizations to utilize automatic updates to help prevent the spread of malware!
The report also underscores some of the trends that we have seen from previous versions of the report: for example, the infection rate for Windows Vista is significantly lower than that of its predecessor, Windows XP. It also tells me that the higher the service pack levels of an OS, the lower the infection rate. Once again, these items help point out that you need to keep your software up-to-date. With Windows 7 now available it might be a good time to look at upgrading your OS! Take a look at the full report at http://www.microsoft/com/sir and use the information to help protect yourself, your networks, and your users. |
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1. Install Graphics drivers. According to your graphic card, you need to install graphic drivers to support advance compiz effects. In this particular case, I'm using nvidia, so in Applications/Ubuntu Software Center search for nvidia drivers without quotes (or ATI, Intel, VIA or other depending of your graphic card). Next select the newest one and click install. If you have older graphic card maybe you should downgrade your driver version. Ubuntu will automatically suggest that when you start System/Administration/Hardware drivers to activate your graphic driver. Select the driver from the list a click activate. After restart you will have new drivers activated with advance compiz effects.. 2. Fonts. To install Microsoft Windows fonts, open your terminal (Applications/Accessories/Terminal) and enter: sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installerIf you want to install any other fonts you can get from the net or use your font database follow this steps:
3. Make LCD Monitor Adjustments To optimize your Ubuntu LCD Screen go to:
4. Make Ubunty 9.10 Multimedia ready (DVD, Divx, Xvid, MP3, WMA, WMV, MOV, etc..). Go to Applications/Ubuntu Software Center and search for Gstreamer plugins. From the list bellow, install one by one next Gstreamer plugins:
To enable protected DVD playback, you must install a few things more: First, Medibuntu to the repository - Medubuntu is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons (copyright, license, patent, etc). Doing that is quite easy, just copy and paste in terminal this commands block by block(Ctrl+Shift+V in terminal to paste): For DVD: sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/karmic.list output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 You can also add Windows, Real Networks, Quick Time and other codecs support: Ubuntu 9.10 32bit sudo apt-get install w32codecs Ubuntu 9.10 64bit sudo apt-get install w64codecs That's it. For DVD player, we recommend to install VLC media player. For anything else, the native Ubuntu player is excellent. 5. Install Screenlets Screenlets are Widgets (Clock, Calendar, Weather and other useful things on your desktop). Go to Application/Ubuntu Software Center, search for Screenlets and Click install. Next you can set up screenlets from Applications/Accesories menu. 6. Mount your Windows HDD 's on Ubuntu startup with PySdm. You can install Pysdm with Ubuntu Software Center or with your terminal: sudo apt-get install pysdm Next run the app with sudo pysdmOn partition list you can found all your hard drives. Click on the drive you want to mount, then on general preferences tab click Mount and apply. If the disks are not mounted on startup, start your Pysdm again and select Mount on startup options then apply. Be careful, dont play with the rest options if you are not experienced user because you can damage your Ubuntu system. 7. Set another Keyboard Layout If your language is not native English, you can set another keyboard layout so you can write to you native language.
8. Add Rar support to Ubuntu. Many files on the net (music, subtitles, e-books, rapidshare files etc...) are packed in .rar so you must add rar support to use them. It is easiest part of all tuning processes so open your terminal and copy/paste next line: sudo apt-get install rar unrar9. Install Skype and additional themes on your Empathy messenger. To install Skype go to Skype official page and download the latest Skype for Ubuntu 8.10+. Open it with gdebi installer and follow the on screen instructions. After that you can find Skype on Applications/Internet menu. To install additional empathy themes follow this excellent DetectorPRO tutorial. 10. Install Adobe Flash Plugin to Firefox You can do it manually from Ubuntu Software Center or Adobe official page (select .deb package in version download) or enter some address with flash content example "youtube" and select install missing plugins from Firefox After all this tunings, make update to your system Go to System/Administration/System Update and make sure that everything is on and up to date. Enjoy and have fun with your new Ubuntu 9.10 experience.  |
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 Install it with double click and then follow the next easy tutorial. You must copy the installed themes on your home folder. Here is the steps:
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With Windows 7 now available worldwide, I wanted to share some resources available to help IT Pros become more proficient with Windows 7 and consumers more savvy about new support resources for Windows 7. Microsoft Learning has developed a wide range of training and resources for IT Pros that address the benefits and key technical aspects of Windows 7. With these resources, IT Pros can prepare for deployments and become Windows 7 experts within in their organization. These resources include:
Since many IT Pros serve double-duty as the IT expert for their friends and family, there are support tools available in and around Windows 7 that make it easier for them to help consumers address their issues. Detailed on Microsofts PressPass site, these resources provide end-to-end Windows 7 support that includes built-in self-healing and support tools, easy-to-use automated and scripted solutions and customer support through new social media forums, including:
For more information about the value of training and certification, and to keep up with new Windows 7 training resources, visit Born to Learn; and for more information about the consumer support resources available in Windows 7, please visit support.microsoft.com. Special thanks to the folks at Microsoft Learning and Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) for reaching out to me and compiling these awesome resources to share with you today. |
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The Windows Marketplace for Mobile client provides users a streamlined experience to purchase and install applications on their Windows Mobile 6.5 devices (coming soon for 6.1, and 6.0).
As you will notice when installing applications, the user interface is different from the typical CAB file installation (see below) perhaps you are used to.
It is very important that the Marketplace install experience be uniform and streamlined. To keep it this way, no custom UI (errors, prompts, informational messages, etc.) should be displayed during installation or uninstallation. If you absolutely must display custom UI, there are some things you should know about the Marketplace client. The Marketplace client achieves a streamlined experience by suppressing the normal user interface, displaying a client specific progress bar and providing feedback when the installation has completed. This can cause problems for applications that have custom prompts implemented in the setup dll. For example, you may want to prompt the user to start your application after installation has completed. This is easily done by adding the appropriate MessageBox prompt to the Install_Init export of your setup dll. However, there can be problems with this. The foreground display of your MessageBox or other custom UI, depends on knowing the window handle of the calling process. When your application is installed with the Marketplace client, no window handle is passed to your setup DLLs exported functions. This can cause your custom UI to not be displayed in the foreground. This causes confusion for the user since it looks like the installation is still running, but there is no UI feedback. The only recourse for the user is to use task manager to locate the prompt window and select it to bring it to the foreground. This is a very poor user experience. You can resolve this by using the MB_TOPMOST | MB_SETFOREGROUND flags when calling MessageBox or WS_EX_TOPMOST when creating a window for custom UI. Have you tried the Marketplace client yet? No? Dont have a 6.5 ROM update or device yet? No problem. Download the Windows Mobile 6.5 standalone emulator images here. These come with a fully functional Marketplace client you can download and install apps with. Hope this helps. Mike |
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Now that Windows 7 is available, are you looking for some security baseline recommendations from the experts? Then here’s another timely release from the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team! Today, new security baselines for Windows® 7 and Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 are available for download. Over the past few months, the Solution Accelerators team collaborated with Microsoft security experts, multiple government agencies worldwide, and a large community of IT security professionals to develop and test these new security baselines.All of these baselines are free for you to use. In case you are not familiar with all of the security baselines available for Microsoft products, they ship as part of the Security Compliance Management Toolkit (SCMT) Series. The SCMT helps you to plan, deploy, and monitor security baselines for Windows® operating systems, Internet Explorer, and 2007 Microsoft® Office applications. It contains background information about compliance, and planning advice about how to automate security compliance. It also refers you to other tools and guidance that you can use to establish and deploy a security baseline, and then monitor and maintain compliance with your established configuration. Where do you start? At a high level, security compliance consists of four basic steps:
The tools, guidance, and recommendations in the SCMT help you through each step of this process and give you the support to make key decisions about security baseline settings for your specific environment. Here’s what you get:
What should you do next?
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