Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Helen Hunt Jackson famously wrote, “By all lovely tokens September is here, with summer’s best of weather and autumn’s best of cheer.” I share Helen’s clear adoration for this time of year. As a sports fan, there are so many “lovely tokens” to enjoy. The baseball pennant race is heating up, college and pro football are underway, and various soccer leagues (real football to the rest of the world) continue.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
In celebration of kids heading back to school, today we’re providing advance notification for the release of 14 bulletins, four Critical and 10 Important, for September 2013. The Critical updates address issues in Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint and Windows. As always, we’ve scheduled the bulletin release for the second Tuesday of the month, Sept.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Today we’re publishing the August 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We fielded 13 questions on various topics during the webcast, with specific bulletin questions focusing primarily on Exchange Server (MS13-061) and Windows Kernel (MS13-063). There were 3 additional questions during the webcast that we were unable to answer on air, and we have also answered those on the Q&A page.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Two weeks ago I, along with 7,500 of my closest friends, attended the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, NV. I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly had a great – if not exhausting – time while there. While there were a lot of great talks, a personal highlight for me each year is the chance to meet and talk with the various people who attend.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
When Microsoft decided to offer not one but three new bounties, paying outside researchers directly for security research on some of our latest products, we put a lot of thought into developing those bounty programs. We developed a customized set of programs designed to create a win-win between the security researcher community and Microsoft’s customers, by focusing on key data about what researchers were doing with vulnerabilities they found in our products.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Over the weekend we received a report from our partners about a possible unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The exploit code uses a memory corruption bug triggered from a webpage but it deeply leverages a Flash SWF file in order to achieve reliable exploitation and code execution.
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
There are those I’ve met who think my life is something akin to the classic comedy Groundhog Day. No, I don’t wake up to the musical stylings of Sonny and Cher each morning, but month after month after month, the second Tuesday rolls around and I’m involved in releasing security updates.
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Two weeks ago, Microsoft made an important evolutionary step in our work with the security community when we announced our first-ever bounty programs for security issues. One week ago, the Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11 Preview became available for download, and the doors officially opened for bounty-eligible submissions to secure [at] Microsoft [dot] com.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
As we announced last week, Microsoft is now offering $100,000 bounties for new exploitation techniques that can bypass our latest platform-wide defenses and up to $50,000 bonus bounties for defense ideas. We’re also offering (from now until July 26) bounties of up to $11,000 for critical security issues in Internet Explorer 11 Preview.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Today we’re publishing the June 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We fielded three questions during the webcast, with specific questions focusing primarily on Windows Print Spooler (MS13-050), Microsoft Office (MS13-051), and the security advisory addressing digital certificates (SA2854544). There was one question we were unable to field on the air which we answered on the Q&A page.
