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Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition 2020 Invites Researchers to Defend and Attack

Monday, June 01, 2020

Machine learning (ML) is an increasingly valuable tool in cyber security as adversaries continually evolve their tactics and techniques to evade detection. As machine learning has advanced and sophisticated ML models have been developed to assist security professionals in protecting the cloud, adversaries have been busy developing malware designed to evade ML models.

Solving Uninitialized Stack Memory on Windows

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

This blog post outlines the work that Microsoft is doing to eliminate uninitialized stack memory vulnerabilities from Windows and why we’re on this path. This blog post will be broken down into a few parts that folks can jump to: Uninitialized Memory Background Potential Solutions to Uninitialized Memory Vulnerabilities InitAll – Automatic Initialization Interesting Findings with InitAll Performance Optimizations Impact for Customers Forward Looking Plans None of this work would have been possible without close partnership between the Visual Studio organization, the Windows organization, and MSRC.

Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge Now Open

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

The Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge is an expansion of Azure Security Lab, announced at Black Hat in August 2019. At that time, a select group of talented researchers was invited to come and do their worst, emulating criminal hackers in a customer-safe cloud environment. This new research challenge aims to spark new high impact security research in Azure Sphere, a comprehensive IoT security solution delivering end to end security across hardware, OS and the cloud.

Congratulating Our Top 2020 Q1 Security Researchers!

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Following the second Security Researcher Quarterly Leaderboard and the 2020 MSRC Most Valuable Security Researchers criteria we published in February 2020, we are excited to announce the 2020 First Quarter (Q1) Security Researcher Leaderboard, listing our top contributing researchers for the last quarter. The top three researchers of the last quarter are: Zhiniang Peng (2870 points), Yuki Chen (1550 points), and Ashar Javed (1520 points).

March 2020 security updates are available

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

We have released the March security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

Calling for security research in Azure Sphere, now generally available

Monday, February 24, 2020

Today, Microsoft released Azure Sphere into General Availability (GA). Azure Sphere’s mission is to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secured and trustworthy IoT devices. Azure Sphere is an end-to-end solution for securely connecting existing equipment and for creating new IoT devices with built-in security. The solution includes hardware, OS, and a cloud service, as well as ongoing security and OS updates to help ensure devices remain secured as threats evolve over time.

February 2020 security updates are available

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

We have released the February security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

Announcing the Xbox Bounty program

Thursday, January 30, 2020

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Xbox Bounty program today. The Xbox bounty program invites gamers, security researchers, and technologists around the world to help identify security vulnerabilities in the Xbox network and services, and share them with the Microsoft Xbox team through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD). Eligible submissions with a clear and concise proof of concept (POC) are eligible for awards up to US$20,000.