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MSRC

Security Research & Defense

MS09-001: Prioritizing the deployment of the SMB bulletin

Friday, January 09, 2009

This month we released an update for SMB that addresses three vulnerabilities. This blog post provides additional information that might help prioritize the deployment of this update, and help explain the risk for code execution. In the bulletin you will see that the cumulative severity rating is Critical for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 systems, while Vista and Server 2008 have cumulative severity ratings of Moderate.

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Information regarding MD5 collisions problem

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Today Microsoft released a security advisory (961509) regarding collisions in MD5 hashes on certificates. This specific problem affects the entire industry and is not a Microsoft specific vulnerability. Serious weaknesses in MD5 have been known for many years now; it is because of these weaknesses that MD5 is banned in new code under the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL).

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Windows Media Player crash not exploitable for code execution

Monday, December 29, 2008

On Christmas Day, the MSRC opened a case tracking a Bugtraq-posted POC describing a “malformed WAV,SND,MID file which can lead to a remote integer overflow”. By Saturday evening, we saw reputable internet sources claiming this bug could lead to executing arbitrary code on the system. We investigated right away and found that this bug cannot be leveraged for arbitrary code execution.

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More information about the SQL stored procedure vulnerability

Monday, December 22, 2008

Security Advisory 961040 provides mitigations and workarounds for a newly-public post-authentication heap buffer overrun in SQL Server, MSDE, and SQL Express. This blog post goes into more detail about the attack surface for each affected version and the overall risk from this vulnerability. As listed in the advisory, the following products have the vulnerable code:

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Clarification on the various workarounds from the recent IE advisory

Friday, December 12, 2008

Today Microsoft revised the Workarounds section of Security Advisory 961051. We wanted to share more detail about the vulnerability and explain the additional workarounds here to help you protect your computers. Information about the vulnerability The vulnerability is caused by memory corruption resulting from the way Internet Explorer handles DHTML Data Bindings.

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MS08-075: Reducing attack surface by turning off protocol handlers

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Today Microsoft released a security update, MS08-075, that fixes a vulnerability in Windows Explorer in Vista and Server 2008 that was exposed through the search-ms protocol handler. This is a remote unauthenticated vulnerability that requires user interaction, so we wanted to give you a bit more information about protocol handlers and how you can reduce your attack surface by turning off any protocol handlers you don’t intend to use.

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MS08-076: Windows Media Components: Part 1 of 2

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Today we released MS08-076, which addresses two flaws in the Windows Media components: Windows Media Player, Windows Media Format Runtime, and Windows Media Services. Viewed separately, the issues are not that severe and the aggregate severity rating is Important at most. However, if the two issues are combined the impact can be quite severe, with the potential for Remote Code Execution.

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MS08-068: SMB credential reflection defense

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Today Microsoft released a security update, MS08-068, which addresses an NTLM reflection vulnerability in the SMB protocol. The vulnerability is rated Important on most operating systems, except Vista and Windows Server 2008 where it has a rating of Moderate. This blog post is intended to explain why the issue is less severe on Vista and Windows Server 2008, and provide some additional details to help people determine the risk they face in their environment.

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Most common questions that we've been asked regarding MS08-067

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Since the release we have received several great questions regarding MS08-067 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx), thus we decided to compile answers for them. We still want to encourage everyone to apply the update. Can the vulnerability be reached through RPC over HTTP? No, the vulnerability cannot be reached through RPC over HTTP. RPC over HTTP is an end-to-end protocol that has three roles: client, proxy and server.

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