Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

Microsoft Bug Bounty Programs Year in Review: $13.7M in Rewards

Thursday, August 11, 2022

The Microsoft Bug Bounty Programs and partnerships with the global security research community are important parts of Microsoft’s holistic approach to defending customers against security threats. Our bounty programs incentivize security research in high-impact areas to stay ahead of the ever-changing security landscapes, emerging technology, and new threats. Security Researchers help us secure millions of customers by discovering and reporting vulnerabilities to Microsoft through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure.

• Bounty
• Bug Bounty Programs
• Community-based Defense
• Researcher Recognition
• Security Researcher

Security Update Guide Notification System News: Create your profile now

Tuesday, August 09, 2022

Sharing information through the Security Update Guide (SUG) is an important part of our ongoing effort to help customers manage security risks and keep systems protected. In January 2022 we introduced Phase One of a new way for customers to receive email notifications about new Microsoft product security content using any email address, not just a Microsoft account, or Live ID as it is sometimes known.

Congratulations to the MSRC 2022 Most Valuable Researchers!

Monday, August 08, 2022

The Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program offers public thanks and recognition to security researchers who help protect our customers through discovering and sharing security vulnerabilities under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. Today, we are excited to recognize this year’s top 100 Most Valuable Researchers (MVRs) based on the

• Community-based Defense
• Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
• Researcher Recognition
• Security Researcher

Microsoft Office to publish symbols starting August 2022

Monday, August 08, 2022

We are excited to announce that Microsoft Office will begin publishing Office symbols for Windows via the Microsoft Public Symbol Server on August 9th 2022. The publication of Office symbols is a part of our continuing investment to improve security and performance for customers and partners. Key Advantages for customers, partners, and Microsoft Security: Empowering the security community to protect customer s

Anatomy of a Cloud-Service Security Update

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Our security teams around the world focus on identifying and mitigating security issues as soon as possible while minimizing customer disruption. One of the challenges of a traditional security update is ensuring customers apply the protections promptly. We recently discussed the work that goes into these updates in The Anatomy of a Security update.

Congratulations to the Top MSRC 2022 Q2 Security Researchers!

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Congratulations to all the researchers recognized in this quarter’s Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program leaderboard! Thank you to everyone for your hard work and continued partnership to secure customers. The top three researchers of the 2022 Q2 Security Researcher Leaderboard are: Yuki Chen, Zhiyi Zhang, and William Söderberg! Check out the full list of researchers recognized this quarter here.

• Community-based Defense
• Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
• Researcher Recognition
• Security Researcher

Mitigation for Azure Storage SDK Client-Side Encryption Padding Oracle Vulnerability

Monday, July 18, 2022

Summary Google informed Microsoft under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) of a padding oracle vulnerability that may affect customers using Azure Storage SDK (for Python, .NET, Java) client-side encryption (CVE-2022-30187). To mitigate this vulnerability, we released a new General Availability (GA) version of the Azure Storage SDK client-side encryption feature (v2) on July 12, 2022.

All Hands-on Deck: A Whole-of-Society Approach for Cybersecurity

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

The morning of June 9th, I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco with my family. While crossing the bridge my children shared some facts about this modern engineering marvel. Each day, approx. 100,000 vehicles travel over the bridge deck, which weighs a staggering 150,000 tons, and is suspended by 250 pairs of steel ropes.

Microsoft Mitigates Azure Site Recovery Vulnerabilities

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Summary Microsoft recently mitigated a set of vulnerabilities in Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and released fixes today, July 12, as part of our regular Update Tuesday cycle. These vulnerabilities affect all ASR on-premises customers using a VMware/Physical to Azure scenario and are fixed in the latest ASR 9.49 release. We recommend customers update to the latest version of ASR at https://aka.

Service Fabric Privilege Escalation from Containerized Workloads on Linux

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD), cloud-security vendor Palo Alto Networks informed Microsoft of an issue affecting Service Fabric (SF) Linux clusters (CVE-2022-30137). The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control of the resource’s host SF node and the entire cluster.