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MSRC

Month Archives: March 2009

Update on Conficker.D

Friday, March 27, 2009

We’ve received a lot of questions from customers about April 1, 2009 and the latest Conficker variant discovered earlier this month, Worm:Win32/Conficker.D (also known as Conficker.C or Downadup.C by some other companies). I wanted to let you know that we’ve put some new information up about Conficker.D today from our work with our partners in the Conficker Working Group.

New EMF gdiplus.dll crash not exploitable for code execution

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Yesterday we noticed a blog post and securityfocus article about a potential new vulnerability in Microsoft GDI+ when parsing a specially-crafted EMF file. You might have heard about it referred to as ‘GpFont.SetData()’. We wanted to address some speculation about this EMF parsing bug. First, our initial investigation shows that it is not exploitable for code execution.

Released build of Internet Explorer 8 blocks Dowd/Sotirov ASLR+DEP .NET bypass

Monday, March 23, 2009

Last summer at BlackHat Vegas, Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd outlined several clever ways to bypass the Windows Vista defense-in-depth protection combination of DEP and ASLR in attacks targeting Internet Explorer. One approach they presented allowed attackers to use .NET framework DLL’s to allocate executable pages of memory at predictable locations within the iexplore.

SOURCE, Not Your Usual Boston Tea Party

Monday, March 23, 2009

I recently returned from the second iteration of the SOURCE Boston computer security conference, and I must say, it was both an intimate conference of less than 250 folks and a high-caliber gathering. As with other conferences that the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) co-sponsors, we see these forums as opportunities that highlight relevant research and showcase how individual strategies can intersect to offer substantial benefits and positive-sum outcomes.

Enhanced GS in Visual Studio 2010

Friday, March 20, 2009

In a previous post we noted some stack-based vulnerabilities, such as MS08-067, that GS was not designed to mitigate due to the degree of control available to an attacker. However, other vulnerabilities such as the ANI parsing vulnerability in MS07-017 would have been mitigated if the GS cookie protection had been applied more broadly.

CanSecWest: Caution, Community at Play

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

CanSecWest, in beautiful Vancouver BC, is one of my favorite conferences each year. It’s a cozy little security con that brings together security researchers from all parts of the security ecosystem. Like a PhNeutral or a BlueHat, one never quite knows what to expect out of a CanSecWest, but we do know that Microsoft products and engineers will play a prominent role.