Time to infection - 12 minutes

A story on CRN tells the grim tale of the lifespan of an unprotected machine - according to information from Sophos, a machine on the Internet averages 12 minutes before it’s infected with a worm.  The Internet Storm Center estimates the time at 34 minutes, while an AvanteGarde study over two weeks calculated an average 4 minutes before an XP SP1 machine was compromised by bots.  Take it as you will – even being very conservative, 34 minutes to infection is unacceptable.  If your machines and XPE devices aren’t protected with a firewall and some good anti-virus software, you’re in for trouble.

Microsoft Turns Off SUS Downloads

If you’re using SUS on an older XPE deployment, take note here – SUS 1.0 (which shipped with XPE SP1) is no longer available for download from Microsoft.  The Windows Update Services component in XPE SP2 supersedes it, and support for the old version ends in one year.  Remember, folks, I didn’t make this decision, I’m just reporting the news here…

Oh, and expect the June security update rollups for the XPE DB to be out soon – they just got through test, and need to go through codesigning and release.  With Monday being a holiday in the States, I can’t guarantee Friday, but I will push it as hard as I can.

Microsoft Turns Off SUS Downloads