The second Windows XP service pack will include a number of changes designed to allay security fears

A Microsoft executive has said the company will launch Service Pack 2 for Windows XP in December, months earlier than the company forecast on its Service Pack roadmap. At the Citrix iForum in Florida on Tuesday, Microsoft's corporate vice president of content, Richard Kaplan, who is in charge of the Microsoft.com and Windows Update Web sites, told delegates that Windows XP SP2 would be available by the end of the year. The service pack was originally planned for this year, but had been put back to 2004.

Kaplan admitted that Microsoft's record on security has "not been good enough", but he claims the company is improving. Security is now the number one priority for Microsoft and that will be demonstrated with SP2, he said, revealing that the update will contain enhanced memory protection in an attempt to reduce the operating system's vulnerability to buffer overflow exploits. "One of the primary way worms get onto the system is by what they call a buffer overflow. There is a new technology that lets us lock out people's ability to install code in Windows using a buffer overflow," he said.

News source: ZDNet

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There are 19 additional comments
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Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by CoLdFuSi0n on 15 Oct 2003 - 18:25
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by gameguy on 15 Oct 2003 - 18:27
wahoo!
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by Mav Phoenix on 15 Oct 2003 - 18:27
Good news.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #4 Posted by Truman on 15 Oct 2003 - 18:36
YAY!
(2 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #5 Posted by ramesees on 15 Oct 2003 - 19:25
Fantastic
Quote this comment #5.1 Posted by petrossa on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:05
Yay! Windows gets more secure after 20 years of failure. Whip out the champagne....
Quote this comment #5.2 Posted by mrk on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:19
go back to linux, farmboy!
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #6 Posted by URsosilly on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:28
Just in time for Xmas!
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #7 Posted by hotrod on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:49
Hope they plan to do something similar with win2k!!
Quote this comment #7.1 Posted by Skyfrog on 16 Oct 2003 - 03:23
Well I would suspect they will improve a lot of things in the next Win2k service pack and they'll probably add this memory protection feature. One of the things they are going to improve in XP is the built in firewall, which doesn't exist in Win2k though.
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #8 Posted by Hekx on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:51
Mmm, service pack.
Quote this comment #8.1 Posted by mrk on 15 Oct 2003 - 20:56
never leave home without it!
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #9 Posted by greggyeggman on 15 Oct 2003 - 23:12
'Hope they plan to do something similar with win2k!!' Thyat will never happen. Win2k is dead!
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #10 Posted by h4x0r b4k3r on 15 Oct 2003 - 23:48
who the freak actually uses win2k?!
Quote this comment #10.1 Posted by Skyfrog on 16 Oct 2003 - 03:25
A lot of people still use it, especially companies. Are you saying they should just forget about Windows 2000 and not update it anymore just because you and a few others think it's too old?
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #11 Posted by mac15 on 16 Oct 2003 - 01:38
great another giant 150mb bug patcher
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #12 Posted by Jugalator on 16 Oct 2003 - 08:29
"There is a new technology that lets us lock out people's ability to install code in Windows using a buffer overflow," he said."

How is this supposed to happen? Can they really detect buffer overflows at install time?

Anyway, that's one thing I really haven't understood with BO exploits... Why does the OS allow a process to read data outside the address space the OS has given it?
Quote this comment #12.1 Posted by KCKitsune on 16 Oct 2003 - 16:19
Sloppy coding. Coders take short cut, miss stupid errors, or can't fix one problem w/o causing more problems.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #13 Posted by mipra on 20 Oct 2003 - 05:15
don't they have to be punished?
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