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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.

DLL planting (aka binary planting/hijacking/preloading) resurface every now and then, it is not always clear on how Microsoft will respond to the report. This blog post will try to clarify the parameters considered while triaging DLL planting issues. It is well known that when an application loads a DLL without specifying a fully qualified path, Windows attempts to locate the DLL by searching a well-defined set of directories in an order known as DLL search order.

On January 3rd, 2018, Microsoft released an advisory and security updates that relate to a new class of discovered hardware vulnerabilities, termed speculative execution side channels, that affect the design methodology and implementation decisions behind many modern microprocessors. This post dives into the technical details of Kernel Virtual Address (KVA) Shadow which is the Windows kernel mitigation for one specific speculative execution side channel: the rogue data cache load vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754, also known as “Meltdown” or “Variant 3”).

On January 3rd, 2018, Microsoft released an advisory and security updates related to a newly discovered class of hardware vulnerabilities involving speculative execution side channels (known as Spectre and Meltdown) that affect AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to varying degrees. If you haven’t had a chance to learn about these issues, we recommend watching The Case of Spectre and Meltdown by the team at TU Graz from BlueHat Israel, reading the blog post by Jann Horn (@tehjh) of Google Project Zero, or reading the FOSDEM 2018 presentation by Jon Masters of Red Hat.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the launch of a limited-time bounty program for speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities. This new class of vulnerabilities was disclosed in January 2018 and represented a major advancement in the research in this field. In recognition of that threat environment change, we are launching a bounty program to encourage research into the new class of vulnerability and the mitigations Microsoft has put in place to help mitigate this class of issues.

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.

For the second in this series of blog entries we want to look into which vulnerability reports make it into the monthly release cadence. It may help to start with some history. In September 2003 we made a change from a release anytime approach to a mostly predictable, monthly release cadence.

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.

This is the first of a series of blog entries to give some insight into the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) business and how we work with security researchers and vulnerability reports. The Microsoft Security Response Center actively recognizes those security researchers who help us to protect our several billion customers and their endpoints in several ways.

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.

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.

Last week, the CERT/CC published an advisory describing some unexpected behavior they observed when enabling system-wide mandatory Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) using Windows Defender Exploit Guard (WDEG) and EMET on Windows 8 and above. In this blog post, we will explain the configuration issue that CERT/CC encountered and describe work arounds to enable the desired behavior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.