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MSRC

Security Research & Defense

Microsoft's continuing work on digital certificates

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Over the past several months, Microsoft has made changes both to our own internal PKI practices and to the Windows Update channel (client-side and server-side) PKI handling. You’ve likely already read about those changes on the MSRC blog, the Microsoft Update blog, and in the associated KB articles (949104, 2720211).

MSXML - 5 steps to stay protected

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Today Microsoft provided nine bulletin updates, as described in July’s Security Bulletin Summary. This post is going to focus on the first of the issues described in the above summary - Vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services Could Allow Remote Code Execution. Step 1 – Be informed MS12-043 describes the security update that resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services.

MSXML: Fix it before fixing it

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Yesterday, Microsoft has released Security Advisory 2719615, associated to a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services. We want to share more details about the issue and explain the additional workarounds available to help you protect your computers. Information about the vulnerability A vulnerability exists in Microsoft XML Core Services 3.0, 4.

Assessing risk for the June 2012 security updates

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Today we released seven security bulletins. Three 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. Bulletin Most likely attack vector Max Bulletin Severity Max Exploit-ability Index Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS12-037(Internet Explorer) Victim browses to a malicious webpage.

Flame malware collision attack explained

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Since our last MSRC blog post, we’ve received questions on the nature of the cryptographic attack we saw in the complex, targeted malware known as Flame. This blog summarizes what our research revealed and why we made the decision to release Security Advisory 2718704 on Sunday night PDT. In short, by default the attacker’s certificate would not work on Windows Vista or more recent versions of Windows.

Microsoft certification authority signing certificates added to the Untrusted Certificate Store

Sunday, June 03, 2012

Today, we released Security Advisory 2718704, notifying customers that unauthorized digital certificates have been found that chain up to a Microsoft sub-certification authority issued under the Microsoft Root Authority. With this blog post, we’d like to dig into more technical aspects of this situation, potential risks to your enterprise, and actions you can take to protect yourself against any potential attacks that would leverage unauthorized certificates signed by Microsoft.

Introducing EMET v3

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

We are pleased to announce the release of a new version of our Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) - EMET 3.0. EMET it is a free utility that helps prevent vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited for code execution. It does so by opt-ing in software to the latest security mitigation technologies.

MS12-034: Duqu, ten CVE's, and removing keyboard layout file attack surface

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

There are several interesting “stories” to tell about security update MS12-034: Addressing the Duqu vulnerability again? Why so many affected products? Keyboard layout behavior introduced with Windows Vista conditionally applied down-level Addressing the Duqu vulnerability again? Five months ago, we released security update MS11-087 to address CVE-2011-3402, a vulnerability that was being exploited by the Duqu malware to execute arbitrary code when a user opened a malicious Office document.

Assessing risk for the April 2012 security updates

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Today we released 6 security bulletins. Four have a maximum severity rating of Critical with the other two addressing Important class vulnerabilities. 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 Rating Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS12-027(Windows Common Controls) Attackers have leveraged this vulnerability in limited, targeted attacks by emailing malicious RTF file to victims.

MS12-025 and XBAP: No longer a driveby threat

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

One of the security bulletins released today, MS12-025, addresses a code execution vulnerability in the .NET Framework. To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would build a malicious XBAP application and lure victims to a malicious website serving the XBAP. The good news is that a zero-click “driveby” style attack is no longer possible from the Internet on workstations where MS11-044 (published June 2011) has been installed.