#microsoft

Today we released Security Advisory 2914486 regarding a local elevation of privilege (EoP) issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003. Windows Vista and later are not affected by this local EoP issue. A member of the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) found this issue being used on systems compromised by a third-party remote code execution vulnerability.

As the proliferation of devices continues to capture the imagination of consumers, and has ignited what is referred to as bring your own device (BYOD) revolution, many IT departments across the globe are now facing increased security considerations. While organizations encourage BYOD for cost savings and productivity, it is also important to have robust security policies supporting BYOD.

Today we’re publishing the November 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. The majority of questions focused on the ActiveX Kill Bits bulletin (MS13-090) and the advisories. We also answered a few general questions that were not specific to any of this month’s updates, but that may be of interest.

In light of recent research into practical attacks on biases in the RC4 stream cipher, Microsoft is recommending that customers enable TLS1.2 in their services and take steps to retire and deprecate RC4 as used in their TLS implementations. Microsoft recommends TLS1.2 with AES-GCM as a more secure alternative which will provide similar performance.

Microsoft is recommending that customers and CA’s stop using SHA-1 for cryptographic applications, including use in SSL/TLS and code signing. Microsoft Security Advisory 2880823 has been released along with the policy announcement that Microsoft will stop recognizing the validity of SHA-1 based certificates after 2016. Background Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) is a message digest algorithm published in 1995 as part of NIST’s Secure Hash Standard.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the movie Gravity, I highly recommend you take the time to check it out. The plot moves a bit slowly at times, but director Alfonso Cuaron’s work portrayal of zero gravity is worth the ticket price alone. Add in stellar acting and you end up with an epic movie that really makes you miss the shuttle program.

In June 2013, we released EMET 4.0 and customer response has been fantastic. Many customers across the world now include EMET as part of their defense-in-depth strategy and appreciate how EMET helps businesses prevent attackers from gaining access to computers systems. Today, we’re releasing a new version, EMET 4.1, with updates that simplify configuration and accelerate deployment.

Late last Friday, November 8, 2013, a vulnerability, CVE-2013-3918, affecting an Internet Explorer ActiveX Control was publically disclosed. We have confirmed that this vulnerability is an issue already scheduled to be addressed in “Bulletin 3”, which will be released as MS13-090, as listed in the November Advanced Notification Service (ANS). The security update will be distributed to customers tomorrow via Windows Update at approximately 10:00 AM PDT.

Today, we’re providing advance notification for the release of eight bulletins, three Critical and five Important, for November 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows, and the Important updates address issues in Windows and Office. While this release won’t include an update for the issue first described in Security Advisory 2896666, we’d like to tell you a bit more about it.

Object lifetime management vulnerabilities represent a very common class of memory safety vulnerability. These vulnerabilities come in many shapes and sizes, and are typically quite difficult to mitigate generically. Vulnerabilities of this type result commonly from incorrect accounting with respect to reference counts describing active users of an object, or improper handling of certain object states or error conditions.