If you use Internet Explorer 9, you’ve probably noticed the new yellow notification bar. One of the things the notification bar tells you is that an add-on might slow down your computer’s performance. The notification also tells you how to disable the add-on or fix the problem.
Add-ons supplement your browser with ActiveX controls and extra features, such as toolbars.
Some add-ons might slow down your computer, but it’s really up to you whether you want to keep using an add-on despite the slowdown. You can use the Add-On Performance Advisor to help identify add-ons that might be slowing you down.
In Internet Explorer 9, if you want to see the add-ons that are already installed, click the tools menu (gear icon ), and then click Manage Add-ons.
For more information, see:
The official Twitter account for the Microsoft Privacy team has relaunched at twitter.com/MSFTPrivacy.
@MSFTPrivacy was launched for us to engage in real-time with our privacy community. We will use this channel to talk about privacy issues, while raising awareness of Microsoft’s approach to addressing concerns through our data governance policies. Here are recent updates you might be interested in:
Follow the Microsoft Privacy team.
The Microsoft Online Safety team also regularly tweets at twitter.com/safer_online. Here, the focus is on Internet safety for families, but we also include relevant privacy and security news.
Recent updates:
Follow the Microsoft Online Safety team.
This week, Richard Boscovich, Senior Attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, announced a $250,000 bounty for information that results in the identification, arrest, and criminal conviction of those responsible for controlling the Rustock botnet.
Microsoft shuttered Rustock (a major source of spam) back in March and we continue both to search for the cyberciminals responsible and to help people regain control of their Rustock-infected computers. If you think your computer might be at risk, learn how you can remove and avoid computer viruses.
Anyone who has with information about Rustock should contact their international law enforcement agency.
For more information, see Microsoft Offers Reward for Information on Rustock.
Right now, in the United States, summer vacation season is here and so are scams. Here are three tips to help you avoid summer travel scams.
1. Watch out for deals that look too good to be true. If you’re still making vacation plans, then you’re probably looking for deals. If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Scammers regularly post fake vacation rental home ads on sites like Craigslist and “free vacation” offers that you get by email probably have strings attached.
If you’re buying tickets or vacation packages online, make sure you follow the same due diligence that you do whenever you buy anything online. For more information, see Email and web scams: How to help protect yourself. 2. Your friend probably didn’t just get robbed in a foreign country. A scammer can take over (or hijack) an email account and send an email to you that looks like it is from a friend. When scammers hijack an email account they regularly prey on the goodwill of the people in your contact list. If you get an email from a friend who needs you to send him money while he’s on his vacation, be suspicious. Find a different way to try to contact your friend to find out if this email really came from him. With Hotmail you can now report a friend who you think has been scammed, even if that friend doesn’t use Hotmail.
For more information, see “I’ve been mugged. Send money!”
3. Be careful with vacation details that you post on your social networking sites and out-of-office emails. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t brag about your Italian vacation to all of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers. We’re just suggesting that you wait until you get home in order to prevent this information from falling into the wrong hands.
For more information, see 11 tips for social networking safety.
Finally, while you probably need to set up an email auto-responder to inform your co-workers that you’ll be out of the office, you probably don’t need to do the same for your personal email account. You can decide if it’s worth it to risk alerting cybercriminals that you’re on vacation.For more information about security on-the-go, see our Mobile and wireless section.
You probably already know that to keep your computer safe, you need to:
But we can also be tricked into installing malicious software (malware) ourselves.
Last month Ed Bott posted an interesting piece about this in his Microsoft Report blog. He also makes a compelling argument that the difference between viruses, worms, spyware, and Trojans doesn’t matter as much as it used to. They’re all nasty and all we want to do is to keep them off our computers.
For more information, see Trojans, viruses, worms: How does malware get on PCs and Macs?
Microsoft releases security updates on the second Tuesday of every month. Today Microsoft released 4 security updates.
Get the updates.
Watch a video about the updates.
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Today the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) posted details about the July security updates. On Tuesday, July 12 at approximately 10 AM Pacific Time Microsoft will release 4 bulletins.
The easiest way to get the updates when they're available is to turn on Windows automatic updating. For more information about how this works, see Understanding Windows automatic updating.
The Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification Service offers details about security updates approximately three business days before they are released. We do this to allow customers (especially IT professionals) to plan for effective deployment of security updates.
Advanced Notification includes information about:
For more information about the security updates that will be released on July 12, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for July 2011.
For official risk and impact analysis, as well as deployment guidance, visit the MSRC blog. If you are on Twitter, you might want also want to follow @MSFTSecResponse.
In March we reported that Microsoft, in cooperation with industry and academic partners, had taken down the Rustock botnet, a notorious source of spam, fraud, and cybercrime.
Hard disks confiscated from Rustock command and control servers
This week Microsoft released new information that explores how Rustock works and how Microsoft defeated the botnet.
Your Internet Explorer home page (that is, the first page you seen when you open Internet Explorer) can be set to any webpage you want. Follow the instructions below to set your home page to one you like. Note, though, that if your Internet Explorer home page has suddenly and inexplicably changed to a webpage you didn’t choose, it could be the result of malware (viruses or spyware). If you follow the directions below and your home page keeps changing back to another page, download and install Microsoft Security Essentials to help remove the malware.
To change your home page in Internet Explorer 9
To change your home page in Internet Explorer 7 and 8
For more information, see Fix your hijacked web browser.