Friday, January 19, 2024
The Microsoft security team detected a nation-state attack on our corporate systems on January 12, 2024, and immediately activated our response process to investigate, disrupt malicious activity, mitigate the attack, and deny the threat actor further access. Microsoft has identified the threat actor as Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as Nobelium.
Monday, January 08, 2024
You asked for it and it’s finally here! The inaugural BlueHat India conference will be held May 16-17th, 2024, in Hyderabad, India! This intimate conference will bring together a unique blend of security researchers and responders, who come together as peers to exchange ideas, experiences, and learnings in the interest of creating a safer and more secure world for all.
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Summary In recent months, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed threat actors leveraging social engineering and phishing techniques to target Windows OS users and utilizing the ms-appinstaller URI scheme. We have addressed and mitigated this malicious activity by turning off ms-appinstaller by default. Additionally, Microsoft has coordinated with Certificate Authorities to revoke the abused code signing certificates utilized by malware samples we have identified.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
This is the second installment of the Azure Serial Console blog, which provides insights to improve defenders’ preparedness when investigating Azure Serial Console activity on Azure Linux virtual machines. While the first blog post discussed various tracing activities, such as using Azure activity and Sysmon logs on Windows virtual machines to trace serial console activity, this blog outlines how to enable logging for Azure Linux virtual machines using Sysmon for Linux to capture and how to send these events to a log analytics workspace.
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
We are excited to announce the new Microsoft Defender Bounty Program with awards of up to $20,000 USD. The Microsoft Defender brand encompasses a variety of products and services designed to enhance the security of the Microsoft customer experience. The Microsoft Defender Bounty Program invites researchers across the globe to identify vulnerabilities in Defender products and services and share them with our team.
Monday, November 20, 2023
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Microsoft Bug Bounty Program, an essential part of our proactive strategy to protect customers from security threats. Since its inception in 2013, Microsoft has awarded more than $60 million to thousands of security researchers from 70 countries. These individuals have discovered and reported vulnerabilities under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, aiding Microsoft in navigating the continuously evolving security threat landscape and emerging technologies.
Friday, November 17, 2023
This year is a landmark moment for Microsoft as we observe the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates, an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world’s approach to cybersecurity. Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative announced this month.
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Summary The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) was made aware of a vulnerability where Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) could expose sensitive information, including credentials, through GitHub Actions logs. The researcher, from Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, found that Azure CLI commands could be used to show sensitive data and output to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) logs.
Monday, October 16, 2023
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 2023 Q3 Security Researcher Leaderboard are Wei, VictorV, and Anonymous! Check out the full list of researchers recognized this quarter here.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Today at BlueHat we announced the new Microsoft AI bug bounty program with awards up to $15,000. This new bounty program features the AI-powered Bing experience as the first in scope product. The following products and integrations are eligible for bounty awards: AI-powered Bing experiences on bing.com in Browser (All major vendors are supported, including Bing Chat, Bing Chat for Enterprise, and Bing Image Creator) AI-powered Bing integration in Microsoft Edge (Windows), including Bing Chat for Enterprise AI-powered Bing integration in the Microsoft Start Application (iOS and Android) AI-powered Bing integration in the Skype Mobile Application (iOS and Android) Full details can be found on our bounty program website.
