Microsoft ended support for its Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) 1.2 on April 30. The tool provided the ability to scan unsupported legacy products such as Microsoft Office 2000, ISA Server 2000, FrontPage Server 2000 and 2002 extensions, Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003, SQL Server 7.0, and SQL Server 2000 without SP4.
The company now recommends that customers who need the ability to scan legacy products use Shavlik NetChk Limited, which produces output that can be opened and read by MBSA 2.0.1.
"Shavlik Technologies was an easy choice for Microsoft to go to for providing continuity in supporting [complete security scanning] for customers who are using some of the older products," said Stephen Toulouse, Group Program Manager at Microsoft. "Shavlik has an intimate knowledge of security detection requirements since they helped develop the first version of MBSA for Microsoft."
Shavlik offers NetChk Limited free of charge. The product can be downloaded from the company's Web site.
MBSA 2.1 is available now as a beta 1 release. The goal of MBSA 2.1 is to provide complete support for Windows Vista. While beta 1 does provide limited support for Vista, like MBSA 2.0.1, it still doesn't provide the means to conduct remote scans of Vista. Beta 2 will add that capability. Meanwhile workarounds for that limitation are possible for users of MBSA 2.0.1.
The company expects to officially release MBSA 2.1 in third quarter 2007.