Microsoft is making the third service pack for Office 2003 available for free download Sept. 18, which the company says strengthens the product’s defenses against malicious software.

"While SP3 will be available as a free download on Sept. 18, customers will also begin to get notified of its availability via Microsoft’s AutoUpdate over the next few weeks," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK.

The research on silent data corruption has mainly been theoretical or anecdotal, not statistical. But now, finally, some statistics are in. And the numbers are worse than you could imagine.

Phishing researchers will congregate at Carnegie Mellon University Oct. 4-5 to debate whether users ever will get a clue about the dangers of phishing, among other issues pertaining to online crime.

Also on the agenda of the second annual Anti-Phishing Working Group’s eCrime Researchers Summit will be presentations and discussion about the security threats posed by online multiplayer games. Security expert Gary McGraw will present a keynote address on the subject. McGraw recently co-authored a book called Exploiting Online Games that examines how cheaters are winning at such online role-playing games such "World of Warcraft," where millions of players compete in the virtual world to win battles or treasure that sometimes is sold later to avid game players for real money.

According to Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, online criminals are getting more sophisticated–even commercial–in the development, distribution, and use of malicious code. Symantec said that while financial gain continues to drive Internet crime, criminals are now using even more professional attack methods, tools, and strategies to conduct malicious activity online.

Microsoft is planning to add the ability to develop Windows Live applications to its Visual Studio toolkit as a way to build more of a developer base for its online services platform.

The company is adding controls to Visual Studio 2008 that will allow developers to connect Windows Live services to new applications they’re building, said Adam Sohn, a director in the Online Services Group at Microsoft. The company is currently testing the technology internally and may also include it in the current 2005 version of Visual Studio, but that is yet to be determined, he said. A public beta of the technology is expected in October or November, Sohn said.

Security provider McAfee pulled the covers off the latest version of ePolicy Orchestrator on Sept. 17, touting its interoperability and several new features allowing users to manage security products for the endpoint and network.

ePO 4 enables users to unite the management of network, data and endpoint security under one console, McAfee officials said. Calling it a big change, McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt said ePO 4.0 now enables customers to correlate data and push signatures to network file-based appliances as well as endpoint appliances.

The OpenOffice.org community announced the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the open source office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities.

Internet crime has become a major commercial activity, reveals a report by computer security company Symantec. The report said cyber crime had become increasingly professional and was now a multi-billion dollar industry.

The underground economy has its own auction sites and marketplaces that sell valuable data such as credit card numbers and bank accounts. They also sell toolkits for novice cyber criminals who lack technical know-how to craft their own attacks.

Microsoft claims updates sent out to Windows XP and Vista machines without users knowing about them were for the Windows Update mechanism, though the company acknowledged it could have been more "transparent" before changing files on user computers.

The company’s response came after users expressed concern over updates to XP and Vista machines that were pushed out even when they had turned off the automatic updating feature of Windows Update. The updates were noted as "secret updates" in published reports and on user forums, and Windows users expressed concern that Microsoft would update their computer files without their knowledge or consent.

A European Union court dismissed Microsoft’s appeal against an EU antitrust order that ordered it to share communications code with rivals and sell a copy of Windows without Media Player.