AppFabric Blog

Today we’re providing advance notification for the release of eight bulletins, three Critical and five Important, for August 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Exchange.

Windows Server 2012 R2 is in preview right now and ready for your evaluation.  We have been rolling out detailed information on our Cloud OS vision though Brad Anderson’s What’s New in 2012 R2 blog series.  That will continue but we thought you would like a short consolidated list for consideration.  Here are some key innovations in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Autoruns v11.70: This release of Autoruns, a powerful utility for scanning and disabling autostart code, adds a new option to have it show only per-user locations, something that is useful when analyzing the autostarts of different accounts than the one that
Autoruns is running under.

Today we are kicking off a new challenge so you can showcase your security prowess and, if we can, help you build some more. Our BlueHat Challenge is a series of computer security questions, which increase in difficulty as you progress. Only the rare and talented engineer will be able to finish the Challenge on the first attempt. It’s not a contest, so there’s no cash involved here, but there will be some great answers we’ll recognize publicly and you could win yourself a big chunk of bragging rights. You can find complete details about this new program over on the Security Research & Defense blog.

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about our approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) - an approach that is open and extensible, driven by experience and most importantly, one that lets you leverage your existing investments.

BriForum kicks off today in Chicago. BriForum 2013 is the only technical virtualization conference that is 100% dedicated to desktop virtualization, VDI, application virtualization, Remote Desktop Services, and the consumerization of IT.

We recently discovered a new breed of the bootkit Rovnix that introduces a private TCP/IP stack.  It seems this is becoming a new trend for this type of malware.

Although People-centric IT capabilities are great on Windows devices, these capabilities are not limited to Windows devices. We also put a lot of work into enabling first class support for heterogeneous devices in our People Centric IT capabilities. Putting users at the center of what we do includes enabling a broad set of devices. Active Directory is a core service enabling this and other scenarios.