Microsoft moves to mute black attack over Prevx prevarication

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 02 December 2009 10:08

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft must be feeling a bit black and blue after being belted by reports that its latest November Windows updates had caused some users to experience what is being called the “black screen of death”, especially after its own investigations suggest malware is the real cause, with Prevx seemingly having made its proclamation prematurely!

After analysing the recent November Windows updates and some reports that it was causing a “black screen of death” issue from some users, Microsoft says that some families of malware are the likely cause, rather than its updates.

Microsoft Security Response Center team member “Christopher” said in a blog post that “We’ve investigated these reports and found that our November Security Updates are not making changes to the system that these reports say are responsible for these issues.”

Christopher denied that Microsoft’s November updates made any changes to the permissions in the registry, and because widespread reports of the black screen issue haven’t flooded in through its “worldwide Customer Service and Support” organisation, Christopher says on Microsoft’s behalf: “Thus we don’t believe the updates are related to the “black screen” behavior described in these reports.”

Microsoft admits that there might be other causes of the black screen issue, of which “some malware families” like “Daonol” cause the “black screen” symptom on Windows PCs which removes all icons from the desktop, the start button and taskbar and if applicable, the sidebar, potentially leaving only a “My Computer” window open or nothing at all.

Microsoft asks its affected customers to contact its customer support lines if they think they are affected by malware or are experiencing problems with security updates, but Microsoft makes no indication as to whether this support would be free or not.

If you’re affected and willing to see if a call to Microsoft helps, you’ll be chuffed to learn that you’ll be helping Microsoft to “determine what might be happening and take steps to help customers by documenting new malware families in our MMPC malware encyclopedia or documenting known issues in our security bulletins and the supporting Knowledge Base articles.”

If Microsoft wrote more robust software in the first place, we wouldn’t need all the clean up effort, black and blue screen BS and encyclopedia building after the fact, but that Microsoft surely exists only in a parallel universe – we can only hope it one day arrives in this reality.

Perhaps only the meteoric rise in popularity of a future version 2 or 3 “Google Chrome OS” will be the trigger to a schism that tears a hole through time and space, hurtling our current Microsoft into that parallel universe and bringing that “good” Microsoft over to this reality.

One of the triggers for the current round of black screen news comes from security firm Prevx, who suggested that millions of XP and Vista users could be affected by the black screen problem while, ever so conveniently, offering a fix that, naturally, wasn’t guaranteed for all users.

Since that post, Prevx has come out with a mea culpa, apologising to Microsoft for any “inconvenience” its blog may have caused.

What precisely did Prevx proclaim? Please proceed on to page 2!