Its Bye-Bye for Office XP and Vista SP1 Next Week!

Microsoft will phase out 2001's Office XP and the first service pack for Windows Vista next week, according to the company's published schedule.

Both Office XP and Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will exit all support July 12, this month's Patch Tuesday. That date will be the last time Microsoft issues security updates for the aging suite and Vista SP1.

Although Office XP's support expires next week, Vista users can continue to receive security updates by upgrading to SP2, the service pack Microsoft launched in May 2009.

Users can install Vista SP2 through Windows Update, or by manually downloading the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the service pack.

The consumer editions of Vista SP2 -- Vista Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate -- exit support in April 2012, while the corporate versions of Vista Business and Vista Enterprise will be supported with security patches through mid-April 2017.

Users can continue to run out-of-support software: There is no "kill switch" that gets thrown to disable or cripple the programs. Without security fixes, however, such software will be increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

Office 2003, the follow-up to Office XP, will receive security updates until April 2014. Office 2007 and Office 2010 will get patches until April 2017 and October 2020, respectively.

Office XP and Vista SP1 were last patched three weeks ago when Microsoft issued 16 security updates that fixed 34 flaws.

Source: Computer World

China Warns About Return of Destructive Panda Virus

A computer worm that China warned Internet users against is an updated version of the Panda Burning Incense virus, which infected millions of PCs in the country three years ago, according to McAfee.

The original Panda worm, also known as Fujacks, caused widespread damage at a time when public knowledge about online security was low, and led to the country's first arrests for virus-writing in 2007. The new worm variant, one of many that have appeared since late 2006, adds a malicious component meant to make infection harder to detect, said Vu Nguyen, a McAfee Labs researcher.

"It has gotten more complex with the addition of a rootkit," said Nguyen. "It definitely makes it more challenging for users to clean up and even to know that their systems have been compromised."

A rootkit burrows into a system to try to hide the existence of malware.

The first Panda worm gained fame in China for switching the icons of infected files with an image of a panda holding three incense sticks. The same image would also flash across a victim's screen, but the worm's final goal was to install password-stealing Trojan horses. The worm infected millions of PCs, according to Chinese state media. Its author was ordered to write a removal tool for the worm and later sentenced to four years in prison.

China's national virus response center warned about the updated worm earlier this week, but it dubbed the virus Worm_Piloyd.B and did not link it to Panda. The center said it had found a worm spreading online that infected executables and html files. The worm blocked a victim's PC from restoring infected files, turned off active antivirus software and directed the machine to Web sites to download Trojan horses and other malware, the center said. The center urged Internet users to step up defense on their PCs against unknown viruses.

The new worm is unlikely to hit as many PCs as the first one. Chinese companies and Internet users are much more aware of malware than they were a few years ago, partly because of the wake-up call brought by the first Panda worm, said Nguyen.

As in other countries, cybercrime looks increasingly professional in China and labor is often divided along the production chain from virus design to the sale of stolen information. Chinese police are rushing to keep pace and cybercrime arrests have become more common in the country. Police in central Hubei province recently took six suspects into custody for building and selling viruses and attacking victims with a botnet, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said this week. The group made over 2 million yuan (US$290,000) in about six months from their activities, the report said.

Separately, a Shanghai court this week sentenced a man to six months in prison after his Internet company spent the equivalent of $17,500 to launch a denial-of-service attack on a rival's servers, according to local media. The man's company, iSpeak, paid for the use of a botnet to attack rival Duowan.com, reports said. A botnet is a network of malware-infected PCs that an attacker can order to repeatedly contact a target server all at once, overwhelming the machine with requests for information and essentially shutting it down.

China officially had 338 million Internet users at the end of June, more than the population of the U.S.