Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

VulnScan – Automated Triage and Root Cause Analysis of Memory Corruption Issues 

Tuesday, October 03, 2017

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) receives reports about potential vulnerabilities in our products and it’s the job of our engineering team to assess the severity, impact, and root cause of these issues. In practice, a significant proportion of these reports turn out to be memory corruption issues. In order to root cause these issues, an MSRC security engineer typically needs to analyze the crash and try to understand what went wrong.

Extending the Microsoft Office Bounty Program

Friday, September 15, 2017

Microsoft announces the extension of the Microsoft Office Bounty Program through December 31, 2017. This extension is retroactive for any cases submitted during the interim. The engagement we have had with the security community has been great and we are looking to continue that collaboration on the Office Insider Builds on Windows.

September 2017 security update release

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. By default, Windows 10 receives these updates automatically, and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

• Security Advisory
• Security Update
• Update Tuesday

Announcing the BlueHat v17 Schedule

Friday, September 01, 2017

September is here! The dash from the close of the call for papers to now has been amazing. We had nearly two hundred submissions spanning the gamut of security topics and presenters. The result is a solid schedule that will challenge and educate all attendees. On behalf of the content advisory board, I want to thank everyone who submitted a paper for consideration.

Moving Beyond EMET II – Windows Defender Exploit Guard

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Since we last wrote about the future of EMET and how it relates to Windows 10 back in November 2016 (see Moving Beyond EMET), we have received lots of invaluable feedback from EMET customers and enthusiasts regarding the upcoming EMET end of life. Based on that feedback, we are excited to share significant new exploit protection and threat mitigation improvements coming with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update!

August 2017 security update release

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. By default, Windows 10 receives these updates automatically, and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

• Security Advisory
• Security Update
• Update Tuesday

The MSRC 2017 list of “Top 100” security researchers

Monday, August 07, 2017

Security researchers play an essential role in Microsoft’s security strategy and are key to community-based defense. To show our appreciation for their hard work and partnership, each year at BlackHat North America, the Microsoft Security Response Center highlights contributions of these researchers through the list of “Top 100” security researchers reporting to Microsoft.

Announcing the Windows Bounty Program

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Windows 10 represents the best and newest in our strong commitment to security with world-class mitigations. One of Microsoft’s longstanding strategies toward improving software security involves investing in defensive technologies that make it difficult and costly for attackers to find, exploit and leverage vulnerabilities. We built in mitigations and defenses such as DEP, ASLR, CFG, CIG, ACG, Device Guard, and Credential Guard to harden our systems and we continue adding defenses such as Windows Defender Application Guard to significantly increase protection to harden entry points while ensuring the customer experience is seamless.

• Bounty Program
• Windows

EnglishmansDentist Exploit Analysis

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Introduction We are continuing our series of blog posts dissecting the exploits released by ShadowBrokers in April 2017. After the first two posts about the SMB exploits known as EternalChampion and EternalSynergy, we’ll move this time to analyze a different tool and we’ll focus on the exploit named EnglishmansDentist designed to target Exchange Server 2003.

Eternal Synergy Exploit Analysis

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Introduction Recently we announced a series of blog posts dissecting the exploits released by the ShadowBrokers in April 2017; specifically some of the less explored exploits. This week we are going to take a look at Eternal Synergy, an SMBv1 authenticated exploit. This one is particularly interesting because many of the exploitation steps are purely packet-based, as opposed to local shellcode execution.