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Security Research & Defense

More information on Security Advisory 2757760's Fix It

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Today, we revised Security Advisory 2757760 with two new pieces of information: A Fix It solution is available to address the vulnerability via an app-compat shim The comprehensive security update will be released out-of-band on Friday. In this blog post, we’d like to explain more about the vulnerability and explain how the Fix It solution addresses the issue.

Weaknesses in MS-CHAPv2 authentication

Monday, August 20, 2012

MS-CHAP is the Microsoft version of the Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol and is described in RFC2759. A recent presentation by Moxie Marlinspike [1] has revealed a breakthrough which reduces the security of MS-CHAPv2 to a single DES encryption (2^56) regardless of the password length. Today, we published Security Advisory 2743314 with recommendations to mitigate the effects of this issue.

Assessing risk for the August 2012 security updates

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Today we released nine security bulletins addressing 26 CVE’s (13 Microsoft and 13 Oracle CVE’s). Five of the bulletins have a maximum severity rating of Critical and the other four have a maximum severity rating of Important. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment.

MS12-054: Not all remote, pre-auth vulnerabilities are equally appetizing for worms..

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

We released security update MS12-054 to address four privately reported issues in Windows networking components failing to properly handle malformed Remote Administration Protocol (RAP) responses. The most severe of these issues, CVE-2012-1851, is a format string vulnerability in the printer spooler service while handling a response message and is a wormable-class vulnerability on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

MS12-060: Addressing a vulnerability in MSCOMCTL.OCX's TabStrip control

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Today we released MS12-060, addressing a potential remote code execution vulnerability in MSCOMCTL.OCX, the binary included with a number of Microsoft products to provide a set of common ActiveX controls. Limited, targeted attacks exploiting CVE-2012-1856 MS12-060 is on the list of high priority updates for this month for two reasons: we are aware of very limited, targeted attacks taking advantage of CVE-2012-1856 and we expect to see new attacks taking advantage of this vulnerability in days ahead.

Announcing the availability of ModSecurity extension for IIS

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Vulnerabilities in on-line services, like cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, or even information disclosure, are important areas of focus for the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). Over the last few years Microsoft has developed a number of tools capable of mitigating selected web specific vulnerabilities (for example, UrlScan). To help on this front we have participated in a community effort to bring the popular open source module ModSecurity to the IIS platform.

EMET 3.5 Tech Preview leverages security mitigations from the BlueHat Prize

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Last year at Black Hat Las Vegas, we announced the BlueHat Prize contest – a large cash prize awarded for defensive security research. One month ago, we announced the names of three finalists. On Thursday night shortly after 10 PM, at the Microsoft Researcher Appreciation Party, we will unveil which finalist won which prize – the grand prize of $200,000 USD, the second prize of $50,000 USD, and the third prize of an MSDN subscription, valued at $10,000 USD.

Assessing risk for the July 2012 security updates

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Today we released nine security bulletins addressing 16 CVE’s. Three of the bulletins have a maximum severity rating of Critical and the other six have a maximum severity rating of Important. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment. Bulletin Most likely attack vector Max Bulletin Severity Max Exploit-ability Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS12-043(MSXML) Victim browses to a malicious webpage.