Friday, November 15, 2013
Today we’re publishing the November 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. The majority of questions focused on the ActiveX Kill Bits bulletin (MS13-090) and the advisories. We also answered a few general questions that were not specific to any of this month’s updates, but that may be of interest.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
If you haven’t had a chance to see the movie Gravity, I highly recommend you take the time to check it out. The plot moves a bit slowly at times, but director Alfonso Cuaron’s work portrayal of zero gravity is worth the ticket price alone. Add in stellar acting and you end up with an epic movie that really makes you miss the shuttle program.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Late last Friday, November 8, 2013, a vulnerability, CVE-2013-3918, affecting an Internet Explorer ActiveX Control was publically disclosed. We have confirmed that this vulnerability is an issue already scheduled to be addressed in “Bulletin 3”, which will be released as MS13-090, as listed in the November Advanced Notification Service (ANS). The security update will be distributed to customers tomorrow via Windows Update at approximately 10:00 AM PDT.
Thursday, November 07, 2013
Today, we’re providing advance notification for the release of eight bulletins, three Critical and five Important, for November 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows, and the Important updates address issues in Windows and Office. While this release won’t include an update for the issue first described in Security Advisory 2896666, we’d like to tell you a bit more about it.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Today we released Security Advisory 2896666 regarding an issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office 2003 through 2010, and all supported versions of Microsoft Lync. We are aware of targeted attacks, largely in the Middle East and South Asia. The current versions of Microsoft Windows and Office are not affected by this issue.
Friday, October 25, 2013
By way of introduction, I am Chris Betz, the leader of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). I’m stepping in to fill the shoes of Mike Reavey, who has moved on to become the General Manager of Secure Operations, still within Trustworthy Computing. Since joining the MSRC, I’ve spent time immersed in learning the business, meeting our global team of security research and response professionals and many of the other teams we frequently interact with here at Microsoft.
Monday, October 14, 2013
On October 1, 2003, Microsoft announced it would move to a monthly security bulletin cadence. Today, marks 10 years since that first monthly security update. We looked at many ways to improve our security preparedness and patch timing was the number one customer request. Your feedback was clear and we delivered a predictable schedule.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Today we’re publishing the October 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We fielded 11 questions during the webcast, with specific bulletin questions focusing primarily on the SharePoint (MS13-084) and Kernel-Mode Drivers (MS13-081) bulletins. There was one additional question that we were unable to answer on air, and we have included a response to that question on the Q&A page.
Monday, October 07, 2013
Back in June of this year, we announced three new bounty programs that will pay researchers for techniques that bypass built-in OS mitigations and protections, for defenses that stop those bypasses and for vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 11 Preview. This past Friday, we provided some additional details about the results of the IE11 Preview bounty program, which covered the first 30 days of the preview period.
Monday, October 07, 2013
This month we release eight bulletins – four Critical and four Important - which address 25* unique CVEs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, SharePoint, .NET Framework, Office, and Silverlight. For those who need to prioritize their deployment planning, we recommend focusing on MS13-080, MS13-081, and MS13-083. Our Bulletin Deployment Priority graph provides an overview of this month’s priority releases (click for larger view).
