ms-msrc

Update on Petya malware attacks As happened recently with WannaCrypt, we again face a malicious attack in the form of ransomware, Petya. In early reports, there was a lot of conflicting information reported on the attacks, including conflation of unrelated and misleading pieces of data, so Microsoft teams mobilized to investigate and analyze, enabling our Malware Protection team to release signatures to detect and protect against the malware. Based on our investigation, the malware was initially delivered via a Ukrainian company’s (M.E.doc) update service for their finance application, which is popular in Ukraine and Russia. Once the initial compromise took hold, the ransomware used multiple tools in its arsenal to spread across impacted networks. If unpatched, the malware uses vulnerabilities CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145 to spread across networks. Microsoft released MS17-010 in March that addressed the vulnerabilities exploited by Petya. If [ more… ]

Extending the Microsoft Edge Bounty Program Over the past ten months we have paid out over $200,000 USD in bounties. This collaboration with the research community has resulted in significant improvements in Edge security and has allowed us to offer more proactive security for our customers. Keeping in line with our philosophy of protecting customers and proactively partnering with researchers, today we are changing the Edge on Windows Insider Preview (WIP) bounty program from a time bound to a sustained bounty program. Since 2013, we have launched three browser bounties to uncover specific vulnerabilities. As security is a continuous effort and not a destination, we prioritize identifying different types of vulnerabilities in different points of time. On August 4, 2016, we launched the Edge Web Platform bounty on WIP to incentivize researchers to send us remote code execution (RCE), same [ more… ]

June 2017 security update release Microsoft releases additional updates for older platforms to protect against potential nation-state activity Today, as part of our regular Update Tuesday schedule, we have taken action to provide additional critical security updates to address vulnerabilities that are at heighted risk of exploitation due to past nation-state activity and disclosures. Some of the releases today are new, and some are for older platforms under custom support agreements, that we are making publicly available today. Customers with automatic updates enabled are protected and there is no additional action required. For customers managing updates, or those on older platforms, we encourage them to apply these updates as soon as possible. Our security teams actively monitor for emerging threats to help us prioritize and take appropriate action. We are committed to ensuring our customers are protected against these potential [ more… ]

Extending Microsoft Edge Bounty Program Over the past 10 months, we’ve paid out more than $200,000 USD in bounties to researchers reporting vulnerabilities through the Microsoft Edge Bounty Program. Partnering with the research community has helped improve Microsoft Edge security, and to continue this collaboration, today we’re extending the end date of the Edge on Windows Insider Preview (WIP) bounty program to June 30, 2017. Details on what the program includes are noted in this TechNet post, and information on Microsoft Bounty Programs can be found at https://aka.ms/BugBounty.  – MSRC and the Microsoft Edge teams Source: Extending Microsoft Edge Bounty Program

Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt attacks Microsoft solution available to protect additional products Today many of our customers around the world and the critical systems they depend on were victims of malicious “WannaCrypt” software. Seeing businesses and individuals affected by cyberattacks, such as the ones reported today, was painful. Microsoft worked throughout the day to ensure we understood the attack and were taking all possible actions to protect our customers. This blog spells out the steps every individual and business should take to stay protected. Additionally, we are taking the highly unusual step of providing a security update for all customers to protect Windows platforms that are in custom support only, including Windows XP, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2003. Customers running Windows 10 were not targeted by the attack today. Details are below. In March, we released a security update [ more… ]