[LINK] Animated cursor flaw in All Windows

[Mike Shearer]

Rick Welykochy wrote:
> Consider the possibility of millions of owned machines in the next
> few months (not to mentioned years). Key-loggers, spam, zombies, the
> whole lot, presented on a platter to the criminal underground in
> Eastern Europe, ready to pick their way through the online riches of
> the West. All courtesy of one operating system!
>
I'm possibly one of those millions.  A home user with my partner who 
runs a home-based one-person business, neither of us computer literate 
beyond kindy level.  I've read the MS announcement and am completely 
befuddled.  To make any sense of it I'd have to make sense of an awful 
lot of material on which it depends.  Reaction: denial, this problem 
won't affect us!

Periodically we get screen announcements that an automatic update is 
about to be executed.  They look like MS's, they happen anyway, we have 
no idea how to verify them, and afterwards everything seems OK.  We run 
Sophos and periodically (i.e, when we think of it) AdAware, and 
everything is reported to be OK.  We have a broadband Telstra service, 
use Ozemail or whatever it's now called (but are about to move to a new 
ISP).  Get and receive email, use IE and Netscape to google, and all 
other activities are local to the home office (or so we believe).  
Lately my aging Toshiba laptop has been firing up extremely slowly but 
experts haven't been able to find any reason other than virus checks 
over the hard drive and/or a mismatch of the system and MS bloatware  
(I'm about to switch to Apple and open source so it's not a compelling 
issue).

OK, so I guess that makes us about average Jo Citizens.  Questions:
1.  does an average JC ever find out about these MS security alerts?  
I've only heard of it so far thru Link.
2.  is it intended that the average JC should be able to make any sense 
out of them? 
3.  what is actually at risk for a user such as I've described us if 
they are ignored?
4.  what is actually at risk for OTHER USERS  if we ignore them?
5.  are MS service packs installed as part of the MS automatic updates?  
How can you find out what exactly MS has been updating, and why? 


Mike Shearer

James Cook University
Townsville   Queensland 4810