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MSRC

2019

Prevent a worm by updating Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-0708)

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Today Microsoft released fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that affects some older versions of Windows. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) itself is not vulnerable. This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. In other words, the vulnerability is ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017.

Microsoft Bounty Program Updates: Faster bounty review, faster payments, and higher rewards

Tuesday, April 02, 2019

In 2018 The Microsoft Bounty Program awarded over $2,000,000 to encourage and reward external security research in key technologies to protect our customers. Building on that success, we are excited to announce a number of improvements in our bounty programs to better serve the security research community. Faster bounty review – As of January 2019, the Cloud, Windows, and Azure DevOps programs now award bounties upon completion of reproduction and assessment of each submission, rather than waiting until the final fix has been determined.

Vulnerability hunting with Semmle QL, part 2

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

The first part of this series introduced Semmle QL, and how the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) are using it to investigate variants of vulnerabilities reported to us. This post discusses an example of how we’ve been using it proactively, covering a security audit of an Azure firmware component. This was part of a wider defense in depth security review of Azure services, exploring attack vectors from the point of view of a hypothetical adversary who has already penetrated at least one security boundary, and now sits in the operating environment of a service backend (marked with * on the diagram below).

Local privilege escalation via the Windows I/O Manager: a variant finding collaboration

Thursday, March 14, 2019

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) investigates all reports of security vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and services to help make our customers and the global online community more secure. We appreciate the excellent vulnerability research reported to us regularly from the security community, and we consider it a privilege to work with these researchers.

Call for Papers | Microsoft BlueHat Shanghai 2019

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) recently announced our first BlueHat security conference in Shanghai which will take place on May 29-30, 2019. After 15 years of BlueHat events in Redmond, Washington and Israel, we are thrilled to expand to a new location. We work with many talented security researchers