Read more: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc185712.aspx

Download now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CD057D9D-86B9-4E35-9733-7ACB0B2A3CA1&displaylang=en

Take a few moments and give yourself a security checkup. If you have any comments or feedback on the tool, feel free to leave them here on my blog—I’ll make sure the right people see it.

From the download page:

The MSAT employs a holistic approach to measuring your security posture by covering topics across people, process, and technology. Findings are coupled with prescriptive guidance and recommended mitigation efforts, including links to more information for additional industry guidance. These resources may assist you in keeping you aware of specific tools and methods that can help change the security posture of your IT environment.

There are two assessments that define the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool:

• Business Risk Profile Assessment
• Defense in Depth Assessment (UPDATED)

The questions identified in the survey portion of the tool and the associated answers are derived from commonly accepted best practices around security, both general and specific. The questions and the recommendations that the tool offers are based on standards such as ISO 17799 and NIST-800.x, as well as recommendations and prescriptive guidance from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group and additional security resources valued in the industry.

After completing an Assessment, you will gain access to a detailed report of your results. You may also compare your results with those of your peers (by industry and company size), provided that you upload your results anonymously to the secure MSAT Web server. When you upload your data the application will simultaneously retrieve the most recent data available. To be able to provide this comparative data, we need customers such as you to upload their information. All information is kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information whatsoever will be sent.

“We’ve updated! On November 14, 2008, LinkedIn published revised versions of our Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. Using LinkedIn means you consent to these policies, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.”

However, if you log out and back, the notice will be gone– so if you weren’t looking too closely, you might not even realize you’ve just consented.

Rebecca Herold at Realtime IT Compliance looked into this and found that the FTC doesn’t much like this kind of implicit privacy changes. Instead, companies should be getting explicit consent, also called “Affirmative express consent,” says the FTC:

As the FTC has made clear in its enforcement and outreach efforts, a company must keep any promises that it makes with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. Therefore, before a company can use data in a manner materially different from promises the company made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from affected consumers.

This would imply that if LinkedIn is updating its privacy policy with such a minimal notice, it may not have changed in any way “materially different” from before. But if it is different, they might face a bit of trouble.