2006 | Microsoft Security Response Center

BlueHat v.4 -- shipped!

Monday, October 23, 2006

Sarah Blankinship here. I’m in the Security Technology Unit (STU), a group responsible for product security at Microsoft. One of the STU’s charters is securing products we have and have not shipped yet. So what is BlueHat? A hacker conference? A way to lure unsuspecting researchers to Microsoft? The /. comments and speculation about our real motivation for hosting hackers at Microsoft are ever entertaining, however BlueHat is about providing a consistent forum for presenting cutting-edge research, for understanding issues that affect both Microsoft and the entire industry, and great way to inform and educate our developer population.

Information on re-release of MS06-061

Thursday, October 19, 2006

¡Hola everyone!, Ben Richeson here. I just want to take a quick moment here to introduce myself as one of the newest members to the MSRC as well as to post (my first blog entry!) about an update to MS06-061. Today, MS06-061 has been re-released to re-offer a revised version of the security update to customers with Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 only.

Information on Reports of IE 7 Vulnerability

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Hi, this is Christopher Budd. We’ve gotten some questions here today about public reports claiming there’s a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7. This is an issue that we have under investigation and so we have some technical information we can share about the issue. These reports are technically inaccurate: the issue concerned in these reports is not in Internet Explorer 7 (or any other version) at all.

PoC published for MS Office 2003 PowerPoint

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Hey everyone this is Alexandra Huft, I wanted to let you know that we’ve been made aware of proof of concept code published publicly affecting Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint. We are currently investigating this report. The reported proof of concept may allow an attacker to execute code on a user’s machine by convincing them to open a specially-crafted PowerPoint file.

October 2006 Bulletin Release

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Hey everyone, Craig Gehre here. We’re in the process of releasing our October 2006 Security Bulletins and I wanted to go ahead and update you on it. We’re releasing ten new Security Bulletins this month: MS06-056 addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows and has a maximum severity rating of Moderate.

October 2006 Advance Notification

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Hello, This is Christopher Budd. It’s the Thursday before the second Tuesday and so I wanted to go ahead and let people know that we’ve posted our Advance Notificationfor October 2006 Microsoft Monthly Security Bulletin Release. Next Tuesday, on October 10, 2006 at approximately 10:00 am PT we are slated to release eleven new security bulletins:

Two new and one updated advisory discussing PoC and exploits

Friday, September 29, 2006

Lennart Wistrand here. This week we’ve seen both proof of concept code posted for a Windows Shell vulnerability. We have also seen limited exploits of a previously publicly disclosed vulnerability in DirectAnimation as well as limited exploits of a PowerPoint vulnerability. We’ve made the Windows Shell advisory available to advise customers of this public PoC.

MS06-055 release.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Hey everyone, Craig Gehre here. We’re in the process of releasing out of band update MS06-055 to address the VML issue. At the moment, Windows Update, Microsoft Update, and Autoupdate are live. We’re in the process of publishing the bulletin, associated packages, and updated content for WSUS, MBSA1.2.1, EST, and MBSA 2.

Update on today's out of band release

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Hi everyone, Scott here to tell you about today’s out of band release. Everything should be available at this point. With this particular vulnerability, the biggest concern we had was around risk. This one affected many different platforms in many scenarios that are considered by customers to be common usage. While the attacks we saw were very limited, our decision to go out of band on this release was really around the risk in combination with the attacks.

A quick entry on the VML issue.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Hi everyone, Scott Deacon here again. Wanted to update you on what we’ve seen to date with the VML issue. Attacks remain limited. There’s been some confusion about that, that somehow attacks are dramatic and widespread. We’re just not seeing that from our data, and our Microsoft Security Response Alliance partners aren’t seeing that at all either.