Exploitation | Microsoft Security Response Center

Software defense: mitigating common exploitation techniques

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

In our previous posts in this series, we described various mitigation improvements that attempt to prevent the exploitation of specific classes of memory safety vulnerabilities such as those that involve stack corruption, heap corruption, and unsafe list management and reference count mismanagement. These mitigations are typically associated with a specific developer mistake such as writing beyond the bounds of a stack or heap buffer, failing to correctly track reference counts, and so on.

CVE-2013-3893: Fix it workaround available

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Today, we released a Fix it workaround tool to address a new IE vulnerability that had been actively exploited in extremely limited, targeted attacks. This Fix it makes a minor modification to mshtml.dll when it is loaded in memory to address the vulnerability. This Fix it workaround tool is linked fromSecurity Advisory 2887505 that describes this issue.

Mitigating the LdrHotPatchRoutine DEP/ASLR bypass with MS13-063

Monday, August 12, 2013

Today we released MS13-063 which includes a defense in depth change to address an exploitation technique that could be used to bypass two important platform mitigations: Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP). As we’ve described in the past, these mitigations play an important role in making it more difficult and costly for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.

Running in the wild, not for so long

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Over the weekend we received a report from our partners about a possible unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The exploit code uses a memory corruption bug triggered from a webpage but it deeply leverages a Flash SWF file in order to achieve reliable exploitation and code execution.

New Bounty Program Details

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Today we announced the upcoming Mitigation Bypass Bounty, the BlueHat Bonus for Defense, and the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty program. It’s very exciting to finally take the wraps off of these initiatives and we are anticipating some great submissions from the security research community! These programs will allow us to reward great work by researchers and improve the security of our software – all to the benefit of our customers.

MS13-037 addressing Pwn2own vulnerabilities

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

MS13-037 addresses a number of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, several of which were reported to us by the TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program. We’ve gotten questions from customers about the specific vulnerabilities purchased by ZDI from the CanSecWest pwn2own contest. We’d like to use this blog post to provide more background on the set of vulnerabilities required for an attacker to exploit modern-day browsers and the state of fixes for those specific vulnerabilities.

Technical Analysis of the Top BlueHat Prize Submissions

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Now that we have announced the winners of the first BlueHat Prize competition, we wanted to provide some technical details on the top entries and explain how we evaluated their submissions. Speaking on behalf of the judges, it was great to see people thinking creatively about defensive solutions to important security problems!

New version of EMET is now available

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Today we are pleased to announce a new version of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) with brand new features and mitigations. Users can click here to download the tool free of charge. The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit enables and implements different techniques to make successful attacks on your system more difficult.

Assessing the risk of public issues currently being tracked by the MSRC

Friday, January 07, 2011

At Microsoft, as at most large software vendors, we are likely to have publicly known issues under investigation at any given time. This is what we do on the Security Research & Defense team. Recently we’ve seen confusion from folks trying to make sense of some of the current public issues.

New Internet Explorer vulnerability affecting all versions of IE

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Today we released Security Advisory 2488013 to notify customers of a new publicly-disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE). This vulnerability affects all versions of IE. Exploiting this vulnerability could lead to unauthorized remote code execution inside the iexplore.exe process. Proof-of-concept exploit bypasses ASLR and DEP The Metasploit project recently published an exploit for this vulnerability using a known technique to evade ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and bypass DEP (Data Execution Prevention).