Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year. In a report released this week, Secunia also criticized CA for the quality of the code in its anti-virus products, saying that "inherent" code problems are exposing CA products to ongoing security vulnerabilities.

New CIO Tony Scott is tasked with implementing Microsoft’s famous "dogfooding" policy. Microsoft has hired former Disney executive Tony Scott as its chief information officer and corporate vice president, to replace ousted CIO Stuart Scott.

Scott, who joins Microsoft in February, will assume responsibility for the software maker’s 4,000-person global IT organization, which is responsible for managing the technology systems that support the company’s worldwide sales, marketing and services efforts, the company said in a statement Jan. 17.

He will also be in charge of enterprise systems and applications for all corporate processes, and will report to Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer.

Messageware announced the release of AttachView 2007 for Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access 2007. AttachView significantly extends the functionality of OWA 2007’s WebReady Viewing feature, making it possible to quickly and securely view 300 file types without the native application.

Kroll Ontrack, provider of data recovery and legal technologies products and services, announced the availability of Ontrack PowerControls 5.0, the newest version of the company’s mailbox recovery tool. Designed to perform fast and easy email search and Exchange server recovery directly from Microsoft Exchange Server backups, Ontrack PowerControls 5.0 further simplifies the restoration process while maintaining internal security policies.

Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability that lies within several versions of the Excel spreadsheet program, Microsoft warned late Tuesday. The problem in Excel allows a hacker to create a malicious Excel document that when opened can compromise a computer, Microsoft said in an advisory. The vulnerability could allow remote code to be executed on a computer, which means a user risks having their personal data exposed.

Microsoft downplayed the risk, saying only targeted attacks have been seen. But since Microsoft Excel documents are commonly used for business, vulnerabilities such as this pose a greater risk.

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that a long-standing and influential member of the Windows OS team has left, one of several recent and imminent executive departures that together represent a changing of the guard at the company. Rob Short, former corporate vice president of the Windows core technology group, left the company last month, according to a spokeswoman from Microsoft’s public relations firm.

Stephen Elop, the new head of Microsoft’s business division, may be a mystery man to those outside of Silicon Valley. But those who have worked for him say Elop, 44, is a no-nonsense, hardworking sales executive who helped take Flash maker Macromedia to new heights during the dot-com boom and, as short-term CEO during the subsequent downturn, helped the company survive by engineering its acquisition by rival Adobe Systems.

Integra for Notes, the Notes to Office integration and reporting product, has released a Personal Edition which delivers functionality for users that wish to extract data from their Lotus Notes personal address book to create mail merges, labels, email shots, lists etc. The FREE tool also includes the ability to produce powerful graphical Excel reports and pivot tables from the data held within users address books. Full features and benefits and FREE download is available immediately.

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors. The new study, freely downloadble Burton’s Web site is entitled "What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications."

Office Open XML (OOXML) is Microsoft’s XML file format that it made the default in its Office 2007 suite. Open Document Format (ODF) is the file format championed by Sun Microsystems, IBM, Google and other Microsoft competitors. Microsoft is seeking ISO standards approval for OOXML, largely to appease customers who prefer/require standards-compliant products, as well as to head off ODF momentum, especially in developing nations.

On February 12, Microsoft will deliver, via its Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) automatic update mechanism for businesses, an update to Internet Explorer 7 that is Windows-Genuine-Advantage-free.

Microsoft made the IE release–known as the IE 7 Installation and Availability Update–available on its software download site in October 2007. Microsoft did not push the update automatically to customers at that time.