US government issues XP warning

The US Department of Energy has warned government users of Windows XP that an easily overlooked feature in the software could result in sensitive information being made public.

An advisory note, issued by the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) within the department, claims the new error reporting feature within the soon-to-be released operating system could send confidential government data across the internet to a Microsoft database.

The error reporting feature within XP is designed to send crash and debug information back to Microsoft to help it detect and fix bugs in its software.

The note states: "The debugging information includes a memory dump which may contain all or part of the document being viewed or edited. This debugging message potentially could contain sensitive, private information."

The CIAC has advised government users to click on the Don't Send button that appears in the Error Reporting dialogue box if the data within the document is considered sensitive.