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August 2012 Security Bulletin Webcast, Q&A, and Slide Deck

Friday, August 17, 2012

Hello. Today we’re publishing the August 2012 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. During the webcast, we fielded twelve questions focusing primarily on MS12-060 covering Windows Common Controls, MS12-052 regarding Internet Explorer, and Security Advisory 2661254 addressing trust certificates with RSA keys less than 1024 bit key lengths. Three additional questions were answered after the webcast.

MS12-060: Addressing a vulnerability in MSCOMCTL.OCX's TabStrip control

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Today we released MS12-060, addressing a potential remote code execution vulnerability in MSCOMCTL.OCX, the binary included with a number of Microsoft products to provide a set of common ActiveX controls. Limited, targeted attacks exploiting CVE-2012-1856 MS12-060 is on the list of high priority updates for this month for two reasons: we are aware of very limited, targeted attacks taking advantage of CVE-2012-1856 and we expect to see new attacks taking advantage of this vulnerability in days ahead.

EMET 3.5 Tech Preview leverages security mitigations from the BlueHat Prize

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Last year at Black Hat Las Vegas, we announced the BlueHat Prize contest – a large cash prize awarded for defensive security research. One month ago, we announced the names of three finalists. On Thursday night shortly after 10 PM, at the Microsoft Researcher Appreciation Party, we will unveil which finalist won which prize – the grand prize of $200,000 USD, the second prize of $50,000 USD, and the third prize of an MSDN subscription, valued at $10,000 USD.

Introducing EMET v3

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

We are pleased to announce the release of a new version of our Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) - EMET 3.0. EMET it is a free utility that helps prevent vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited for code execution. It does so by opt-ing in software to the latest security mitigation technologies.

MS12-027: Enhanced protections regarding ActiveX controls in Microsoft Office documents

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Security Update MS12-027 addresses a code execution vulnerability in MSCOMCTL.OCX, the Windows Common Controls ActiveX control. By default, this component is included with all 32-bit versions of Microsoft Office. We’d like to cover the following topics in this blog post: Limited, targeted attacks leveraging this vulnerability Mitigations in recent versions of Office to reduce the risk Extra protections to block all or specific ActiveX controls in Office documents The new Office 2010 kill bit feature Limited, targeted attacks leveraging this vulnerability

BlueHat Prize entries: The final tally is…

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Handle: k8e IRL: Katie Moussouris Rank: Senior Security Strategist Lead, Head of Microsoft’s Security Community and Strategy Team Likes: Cool vulns, BlueHat, soldering irons, quantum teleportation Dislikes: Rudeness, socks-n-sandals, licorice The entries are in! After a last-minute wave of fresh entries to the first-ever BlueHat Prize, the final count for this year’s contest stands at twenty qualified proposals.

CVE-2012-0002: A closer look at MS12-020's critical issue

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Security Update MS12-020 addresses two vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). One of the two, CVE-2012-0002, is a Critical, remote code execution vulnerability affecting all versions of Windows. This blog post shares additional information with the following goals: To strongly encourage you to make a special priority of applying this particular update; To give you an option to harden your environment until the update can be applied.