Microsoft has found itself in yet another controversy
Bangalore: Microsoft has found itself in yet another controversy. Many computers using Windows operating system have encountered a black screen, which is now called as "black screen of death." To worsen the matter, Prevx, a maker of anti-virus software, attributed some of these black screen crashes to a recent Window operating system change that locked down Windows registry keys.
Microsoft has strongly replied back to these accusations. "Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for some customers," said Christopher Budd, Microsoft Security Response Communications Lead, in an e-mailed statement to Information Week. "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports. While we were not contacted by the organization (that) originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings."
Microsoft's Budd counters that his company's worldwide Customer Service and Support organization is "not seeing 'black screen' behavior as a broad customer issue." He adds that seeing a black screen is a known symptom of certain malware families, such as Daonol.
Prevx's Jacques Erasmus, has confirmed in a blog post now that Microsoft's patch was not to be blamed and has apologized to Microsoft. "We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused," he said.
So what caused this problem after all? Erasmus has explained that the issue is related to a characteristic of the Windows Registry related to the storage of string data. In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null terminated "REG_SZ" string. However, if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.
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