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Risk Asessment

Assessing the risk of the February Security Bulletins

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

This morning, we released 13 security bulletins. Five have maximum severity rating of Critical, seven Important, and one Moderate. One security bulletin (MS10-015, ntvdm.dll) has exploit code already published, but we are not aware of any active attacks or customer impact. We hope that the table and commentary below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately.

Details on the New TLS Advisory

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Security Advisory 977377: Vulnerability in TLS Could Allow Spoofing In August of 2009, researchers at PhoneFactor discovered a vulnerability in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. As the issue is present in the actual TLS/SSL-standard, not only our implementation, Microsoft is working together with ICASI, the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet to address this vulnerability.

Assessing risk of IE 0day vulnerability

Friday, January 15, 2010

Yesterday, the MSRC released Microsoft Security Advisory 979352 alerting customers to limited, sophisticated attacks targeting Internet Explorer 6 customers. Today, samples of that exploit were made publicly available. Before we get into the details I want to make one thing perfectly clear. The attacks we have seen to date, including the exploit released publicly, only affect customers using Internet Explorer 6.

MS10-001: Font file decompression vulnerability

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

MS10-001 addresses a vulnerability (CVE-2010-0018 ) in the LZCOMP de-compressor for Microtype Express Fonts. This blog aims to answer some questions regarding the updates we’ve made in this area. What is the issue? t2embed.dll improperly performs bounds-checking on lengths which are decoded from the LZCOMP bit-stream. This made it possible for a copy loop to violate the intended working buffer.

Assessing the risk of the December security bulletins

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

This morning we released six security bulletins, three Critical and three Important, addressing 12 CVE’s. Please apply the Internet Explorer update right away as it poses the most risk of all the bulletins due to severity and exploitability. The Internet Explorer update addresses the vulnerability described by Security Advisory 977981. We hope that the table and commentary below will help you prioritize the deployment of the other updates appropriately.

Extended Protection for Authentication

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

This month, Microsoft is releasing several non-security updates that implement Extended Protection for Authentication as a mechanism to help safeguard authentication credentials on the Windows platform. These new updates are not security bulletins, but non-security updates that allow web clients using the Windows HTTP Services, IIS web servers and applications based on the HTTP Protocol Stack (http.

Assessing the risk of the October security bulletins

Monday, October 12, 2009

This morning we released 13 security bulletins, our largest release of 2009. Altogether, these bulletins address 34 separate CVEs. We’d like to use this blog post to help you prioritize your deployment of the updates. Prioritization Criteria We’ve provided a prioritized list of bulletins in the table below. The prioritization is based on the following criteria:

MS09-051: A note on the affected platforms

Monday, October 12, 2009

MS09-051 addresses a vulnerability (CVE-2009-0555) in the speech codec of Microsoft Window Media Component. Users of Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows Server 2003/Windows Server 2008* are affected by this vulnerability. However, for Win2k users, the story is more complex and we would like to go into more detail in this blog. *Windows Server 2008 Core installation is not affected.

MS09-056: Addressing the X.509 CryptoAPI ASN.1 security vulnerabilities

Monday, October 12, 2009

MS09-056 addresses two vulnerabilities that affect how the Windows CryptoAPI parses X.509 digital certificates. Applications on the Windows platform as well as Windows components such as the WinHTTP API can call into the CryptoAPI which provides cryptographic services to validate digital certificates. Internet Explorer, for instance, uses the CryptoAPI to parse and validate the certificate of remote web servers while browsing.