Microsoft has finally realized that providing limited information about upcoming monthly security patches doesn’t cut it in today’s super-transparent, information-hungry world. The company has announced that it’s changing the Advanced Notification Service (ANS) to include more information – information that users might actually find useful.

The company sends out an advanced notificattion on the Thursday before “Patch Tuesday”, which is the second Tuesday of each month, when the security updates are actually released. Unfortunately, these notifications have until now only contained limited information, such as the platforms affected  by the updates, and their maximum secuity rating.

The thinking behind issuing such limited information has been that Microsoft did not want to assist hackers to exploit vulnerabilies. However, this approach has sometimes left legitimate computer users guessing about which particular problems were to be fixed.

From June 7, the date of the next scheduled ANS, Microsoft has promised to include more detailed information about its updates, including maximum severity rating, impact of vulnerability, detection information, and affected software.

“We’ve received positive feedback on the ANS, but customers have also told us that additional information would be even more helpful. Based on that, we are incorporating additional detail about the upcoming security updates,” wrote Mark Miller, on Microsoft’s Securityt Response Centre Blog. 

Interested users can subscribe to the ANS and other alerts at Microsoft’s web site.

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 11:50 am under Microsoft, Security.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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