Microsoft tackles phishing with Office 2003 SP2

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 28 Sep 2005 at 12:47

Microsoft has unveiled Service Pack 2 for Office 2003.

Among the improvements, Outlook receives a series of updates to help safeguard against phishing. These include notifying the user of suspicious URLs and automatically disabling those links. Indeed all mail dumped into the Junk folder will be rendered in plain text. The recipient needs to identify the mail as genuine by moving it to the inbox in order to display the original format.

Outlook is also updated to allow the sending of InterConnect items, and this extends back to Outlook 2002 with IE 6.0.

With SP2, Outlook will be able to use Office Communicator without having to have Windows Messenger installed, and Communicator's presence features will be enabled even if it isn't started up before Office.

SharePoint Server receives a good bit of tweaking with SP2, predominantly on the security front. This includes being better able to synchronise patches, and support for the following: Windows on Windows (WOW 64) for x64 editions, Reverse Proxy and Alternate URL, IP Bound virtual server, Off box SSL termination and the forthcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Many of these improvements are also supplied to Windows SharePoint Services too.

Other products in the Office suite get stability and improved language updates, as well as compatibility with the upcoming SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

A number of the fixes have already been previously available - SP2 amalgamates them in a single patch.

Customer with Autoupdate enabled will automatically be notified of the availability of SP2. It can also be downloaded from the Microsoft website.