Microsoft 'fix' cripples ZoneAlarm users.

[nihil]

Firstly, if you follow t34b4g5 link above you will find that the page has been updated with fixes for all the other ZA products.

If you look more closely you will see that the real issue is one of third party vendors interfacing with proprietary closed source operating systems. With Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft did not encourage third parties to hook to the Windows kernel, so there were no guidelines or documentation.

Vendors just "did their own thing" and it so happens that ZA's method fell foul of Microsoft's method of fixing the DNS hole. In fact, what happened was that ZA saw Windows doing strange things and blocked the internet connection accordingly. So, it was ZA's product that caused the issue............... you might even describe it as "the mother of all false positives"

Kernel hooking for Vista is documented, which is why there were no problems with that OS.

EDIT:

I have now tested the new ZA version with Microsoft's KB951748 installed on both Windows XP SP3 and 2000 SP4 and everything works just fine

@ MLF

Debian is vulnerable, according to CERT:

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/MIMG-7ECL6S