#microsoft

This month we release eight bulletins – four Critical and four Important - which address 25* unique CVEs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, SharePoint, .NET Framework, Office, and Silverlight. For those who need to prioritize their deployment planning, we recommend focusing on MS13-080, MS13-081, and MS13-083. Our Bulletin Deployment Priority graph provides an overview of this month’s priority releases (click for larger view).

Fall is a season traditionally associated with a harvest after planting the seeds and tending the crops. Today I’m proud to announce the names of six very smart people who have helped us make our products more secure by participating in our new bounty programs. When we launched our bounty programs in June this year, we had a few strategic goals in mind:

Today we’re providing advance notification for the release of eight bulletins, four Critical and four Important, for October 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, .NET Framework and Windows. The Critical update for Internet Explorer will be a cumulative update which will address the publicly disclosed issue described in Security Advisory 2887505.

Software Defense is a broad topic requiring a multipronged approach including: - the processes and tooling associated with secure development (that we try and encapsulate within the Microsoft SDL), - core OS countermeasures that make exploitation of a given vulnerability more difficult for an attacker, - steps to secure the hardware on which the software runs,

Today, we released a Fix it workaround tool to address a new IE vulnerability that had been actively exploited in extremely limited, targeted attacks. This Fix it makes a minor modification to mshtml.dll when it is loaded in memory to address the vulnerability. This Fix it workaround tool is linked fromSecurity Advisory 2887505 that describes this issue.

Today we released Security Advisory 2887505 regarding an issue that affects Internet Explorer. There are only reports of a limited number of targeted attacks specifically directed at Internet Explorer 8 and 9, although the issue could potentially affect all supported versions. This issue could allow remote code execution if an affected system browses to a website containing malicious content directed towards the specific browser type.

Today we’re publishing the September 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. The majority of questions focused on Office bulletins, especially SharePoint Server (MS13-067). We received multiple Office related questions that were very similar in nature, so the questions have been merged, as applicable, with consolidated answers provided. We were able to answer six questions on air, and those we did not have time for have been included on the Q&A page.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 SP3, 2010 SP1 and SP2, and 2013; Office Web Apps 2010; Excel 2003 SP3, 2007 SP3, 2010 SP1 and SP2, 2013, and 2013 RT; Office for Mac 2011; Excel Viewer; and Office Compatibility Pack SP3 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (memory corruption) via a crafted Office document, aka "Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability."

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.

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.