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Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.

It was announced today that there was a major DNS security flaw that could allow attackers easily to compromise any name server; it also affects clients.

Here are some specific news articles about this (for techies only)

• Slashdot
• Internet Systems Consortium
• Internet Storm Centre
• Microsoft Security bulletin

What does this mean for you?

Patch your Windows XP PC using Microsoft Update or Windows Update. If you have a MAC use Software Update to patch it. I am not sure if they have released patches yet for MAC but will update this when I find out.

I have full instructions and screenshots for Windows XP and Vista below – also a couple of screenshots for Server 2003 / SBS 2003, though server owners SHOULD know how and when to patch their servers.

So far I have installed XP Service pack 3 as follows:

Brand New XP installation P4 1GB Ram - Went really fast and no errors

Virtual Machine - went real slow but no errors

Existing machine P4 1GB Ram - extremely slow - no errors

Existing machine P3 512MB Ram - extremely slow - 1 error - couldn't copy atapi.sys from c:\windows\system32\drivers. After a bit of research I simply deleted the atapi.sys file and closed daemon tools.

Not mine fortunately, though I have one laptop that I haven't been able to install the Service Pack on at all yet - will look at why later. (Update - I uninstalled the non supported language packs and then SP1 installed correctly.)

The point of this article is to provide a resource in one place of as many issues and resolutions for Vista Service Pack 1 installation problems as possible in one place. Note I will continue to add to this page as I get more information. It might pay to book mark this one using delicious or stumbleupon.

Microsoft Pages for Vista SP1