Last month, reports from security vendors claim that Microsoft's latest round of patches was causing software problems that lead to the "Black Screen of Death."
Apparently, patches that affect Windows 7, Vista and XP made changes to the Access Control List that have caused installed applications to cough up the Black Screen of Death.
Security firm Prevx believed that Microsoft's patches for Windows 7, Vista and XP made changes to the Access Control List that have caused installed applications to cough up the Black Screen of Death. Prevx offered users a free patch that supposedly fixed things.
Microsoft, however, held back to investigate the supposed problem and now says that whatever is causing the Black Screen of Death isn't its fault.
"We’ve investigated these reports and found that our November Security Updates are not making changes to the system that these reports say are responsible for these issues," Microsoft wrote on it Security Response Center blog.
Reports claimed that Microsoft's updates security updates made permission changes in the registry to the value for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell key.
Microsoft responded, "We’ve conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security updates we released through Windows Update in November. That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don’t believe the updates are related to the 'black screen' behavior described in these reports."
Microsoft added that its worldwide Customer Service and Support organization is not seeing "black screen" behavior as a broad customer issue, but does know that such behavior is associated with some malware families such as Daonol.
Have you been hit by the Black Screen of Death? If so, was it malware and were you able to get rid of it?
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