#microsoft

With about one week to go before we all gather at Black Hat in Las Vegas, we’re getting inquiries about precisely how the promised Live Mitigation Bypass Bounty judging at Black Hat will work. For most of the world, it works best when you get a good spot at the Microsoft booth (#301) around noon each day, so you can clearly see the excitement as some of security’s best and brightest look to pop built-in Windows 8.

We’re three weeks into our new world of bounties for Microsoft products now, and as the clock ticks down on one program, we’re prepping for some live excitement with one of the others. First, the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bounty is entering its final 10 days; the bounty period for that program closes on the 26th of July.

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.

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.

Today we released seven security bulletins addressing 34 CVE’s. Six bulletins have a maximum severity rating of Critical, and one has a maximum severity rating of Important. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment. Bulletin Most likely attack vector Max Bulletin Severity Max Exploit-ability rating Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS13-055(Internet Explorer) Victim browses to a malicious webpage.

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.

Today we’re providing advance notification for the release of seven bulletins, six Critical and one Important, for July 2013. The Critical bulletins address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, .NET Framework, Silverlight, Internet Explorer and GDI+. Also scheduled for inclusion among these Critical bulletins is an update to address CVE-2013-3660, which is a publicly known issue in the Kernel-Mode Drivers component of Windows.

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.

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.

Over the years, we’ve put a lot of work into helping secure the computing ecosystem and limiting the number of issues in our products. The security researcher community is critical to these efforts, as they help us find vulnerabilities in our software that we may have missed. Now we’re taking it even further.