In a Microsoft Security Response Center blog post yesterday, Microsoft wrote about “evolving” Microsoft’s Advance Notification Service. In the article, it is explained that Microsoft will no longer be providing the Advanced Notifications in general.
We are making changes to how we distribute ANS to customers. Moving forward, we will provide ANS information directly to Premier customers and current organizations involved in our security programs, and will no longer make this information broadly available through a blog post and web page.
Instead of relying on emails or RSS feeds from Microsoft to provide information about upcoming updates, you may investigate if your other security products provide that information in a usable format since the Patch Tuesday process of reviewing and approving updates will have to be adapted. Microsoft does provide the ability to register to access a Security Bulletins Dashboard. You can register at http://mybulletins.technet.microsoft.com/
The Bulletin allows you to sign in with your Microsoft account and tailor the dashboard to Microsoft products that you care about. By filtering the information to only updates for products that are in your environment, it should make the information more relevant and useful, just not in the most convenient format.
For more information about the myBulletins dashboard, you can view the myBulletins Q&A which answers some questions about why they are changing their approach and specifics about the content of the dashboard.
I could see Microsoft privatizing this information to prevent malicious actors from trying to exploit an unpatched vulnerability but Microsoft gives no indication of that being the case.
We will have to see if Microsoft continues to update their Security Bulletins page on the Security TechCenter but I thought this would fall into the no longer making this broadly available through a web page.