A quick follow up to yesterday’s report about the Mydoom virus: You can stay informed of security updates from Microsoft via the security mailing lists available on the Microsoft Security web site. There are two lists, one for general users and one for technical folks, so you can choose the level of information you want to get about security issues. These are good resources if you want to make sure your machine is secure against viruses that exploit Microsoft vulnerabilities—though it doesn’t look like they will help much in the case of Mydoom.
Incidentally, why does Microsoft.com offer email alerts and not RSS feeds for advisories? Good question. As Scoble has said, it will take a lot of effort before Microsoft.com is fully RSS-enabled. Also, there are some users, like my dad, for whom an RSS feed isn’t the right answer for notification, at least not now. There are still a lot of problems to be solved in RSS before we can assume that everyone understands and uses the technology.
In the meantime, for those who do use RSS, there are scraped RSS feeds of security bulletins, hotfix announcements, and patches available from NewsIsFree, PatchDayReview (with evaluations of each patch), and KBAlertz (by product).