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Attack Vector

Assessing the risk of the September security updates

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Today we released nine security bulletins. Four have a maximum severity rating of Critical with the other five having a maximum severity rating of Important. Furthermore, six of the nine bulletins either do not affect the latest version of our products or affect them with reduced severity. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment.

An update on the DLL-preloading remote attack vector

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Last week, we released Security Advisory 2269637 notifying customers of a publicly disclosed remote attack vector to a class of vulnerabilities affecting applications that load dynamic-link libraries (DLL’s) in an insecure manner. At that time, we also released a tool to help protect systems by disallowing unsafe DLL-loading behavior. Today we wanted to provide an update by answering several questions we have received from customers and addressing common misperceptions about the risk posed by this class of vulnerability.

Security Advisory 2286198 Updated

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

We’ve just updated Microsoft Security Advisory 2286198 to let customers know that we now have an automated “Fix It” available to implement the workaround we first outlined in our original posting on Friday, July 16, 2010. More information is available in the KB article 2286198, but in summary running the “Fix It” can help prevent attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability.

Assessing the risk of the April Security Bulletins

Monday, April 12, 2010

Today we released eleven security bulletins with security updates addressing 25 CVE’s. Five of the bulletins have at least one CVE rated Critical. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize this month’s deployment. Bulletin Most likely attack vector Max Bulletin Severity Max Exploit-ability Index Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS10-027 (WMP) Victim browses to a malicious webpage.

MS10-020: SMB Client Update

Monday, April 12, 2010

Today Microsoft released MS10-020, which addresses several vulnerabilities in the Windows SMB client. This blog post provides additional details to help prioritize installation of the update, and understand the attack vectors and mitigations that apply. Client-side vulnerabilities The first thing to realize is that this update addresses vulnerabilities in the SMB ** client ** in Windows.

Registry vulnerabilities addressed by MS10-021

Monday, April 12, 2010

MS10-021 addresses eight different Windows vulnerabilities. Five of them, CVE-2010-0234 through CVE-2010-0238, stem from an obscure bit of Windows registry functionality called “registry links”. A quick search in MSDN reveals this description: “REG_LINK: Specifies a Unicode symbolic link. Used internally. Applications do not use this type”. Clear as mud, right? Registry links are similar to symbolic links in NTFS (http://msdn.

Security Advisory 981374 Released

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Hi everyone, Today we released Security Advisory 981374 addressing a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 8 is not affected by this issue. Customers using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 should upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 immediately to benefit from the improved security features and defense in depth protections.

Security Advisory 981169 Released

Monday, March 01, 2010

Hello again, Today we released Security Advisory 981169 to address the VBScript issue involving Windows Help files that we blogged about yesterday. To reiterate what we said in that post, we are not aware of any active attacks at this time and the following operating systems are not affected by this issue: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista.