Monday, October 13, 2008
The past few days, we have had service isolation on our minds here in Redmond after the POC code posting last week from Cesar Cerrudo. Nazim Lala from the IIS team posted a great blog entry about the fix and why it is taking so long to release it. I expect it to be close to the amount of code churn as XP SP2.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
MS08-049 is an update for the Windows Event System service to correct an authenticated elevation-of-privilege vulnerability. We received a question via email yesterday about the type of authentication needed to exploit CVE-2008-1456. Our security bulletin was a little ambiguous with one reference to “logon credentials” and another to “domain credentials”. The email question was from an IT security manager who wondered whether his hardened servers could be compromised remotely.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
MS08-041 fixes a vulnerability in the Microsoft Access Snapshot Viewer ActiveX control. It’s an interesting vulnerability so we wanted to go into more detail about platforms at reduced risk and also more about the servicing strategy for this vulnerability. Windows Vista at reduced risk? We first heard about this vulnerability from customers sending in reports of active attacks.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
In this month’s update for Excel we addressed an interesting CVE (CVE-2008-3003) – the first vulnerability to affect the new Open XML file format (but it doesn’t result in code execution). This is an information disclosure vulnerability that can arise when a user makes a data connection from Excel to a remote data source and checks a checkbox to have Excel NOT save the password used in that connection to the file.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Recently, there was a public post in milw0rm (http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/5530), talking about an issue in the ActiveX control of Microsoft Works 7 WkImgSrv.dll. The PoC claims that it would achieve remote code execution. McAfee Avert Labs Blog also had a post about this (http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/04/17/potential-microsoft-works-activex-0-day-surfaces/). At first glance the issue sounds serious, right?
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
MS08-015, CVE-2008-0110, addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook’s implementation of “mailto” URI handling. The attack can be launched via IE or other applications which invoke the “mailto” protocol. Applications can register pluggable protocol handlers to handle a custom Uniform Resource Locator (URL) protocol scheme. Here “mailto” is one example of the various protocol handles that can be registered.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
This is the second post in the three-part series covering MS08-001. In this post we’ll look at the ICMP vulnerability (CVE-2007-0066) in more detail. This vulnerability is caused by Windows TCP/IP’s handling of the ICMP protocol, specifically regarding router advertisement messages. This post covers the mitigating factors for this vulnerability in more detail.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
MS07-065 fixed a vulnerability in the Message Queueing service. On Windows 2000, a remote anonymous attacker could use this vulnerability to run code as local system on unpatched machines. Windows XP added defense-in-depth hardening to disallow remote access for this service that does not need to be exposed remotely. So on Windows XP, the attacker must be logged on locally on the box.
