#microsoft

Today we published the April 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We answered 13 questions in total, with the majority focusing on the update for Internet Explorer (MS14-018) and the Windows 8.1 Update (KB2919355). Two questions that were not answered on air have been included on the Q&A page.

T. S. Elliot once said, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” So as we put one season to bed, let’s start another by looking at the April security updates. Today, we release four bulletins to address 11 CVEs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

Today we provide advance notification for the release of four bulletins, two rated Critical and two rated Important in severity. These updates address issues in Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer. The update provided through MS14-017 fully addresses the Microsoft Word issue first described in Security Advisory 2953095. This advisory also included a Fix it to disable opening rich-text format (RTF) files within Microsoft Word.

It is often said that attackers have an advantage, because the defenders have to protect every part of their systems all the time, while the attacker only has to find one way in. This argument oversimplifies the security landscape and the real strength that defenders can achieve if they work together.

CRLF injection vulnerability in spacewalk-java before 2.1.148-1 and Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite 5.6 allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary HTTP headers, and conduct HTTP response splitting attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, via the return_url parameter.

Today we released Security Advisory 2953095 to notify customers of a vulnerability in Microsoft Word. At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010. An attacker could cause remote code execution if someone was convinced to open a specially crafted Rich Text Format (RTF) file or a specially crafted mail in Microsoft Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email viewer.

Today, Microsoft released Security Advisory 2953095 to notify customers of a vulnerability in Microsoft Word. At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010. This blog will discuss mitigations and temporary defensive strategies that will help customers to protect themselves while we are working on a security update.

Today we published the March 2014 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We answered eight questions in total, with the majority focusing on the updates for Windows (MS14-016) and Internet Explorer (MS14-012). One question that was not answered on air has been included on the Q&A page. Here is the video replay.

We wrote several times in this blog about the importance of enabling Address Space Layout Randomization mitigation (ASLR) in modern software because it’s a very important defense mechanism that can increase the cost of writing exploits for attackers and in some cases prevent reliable exploitation. In today’s blog, we’ll go through ASLR one more time to show in practice how it can be valuable to mitigate two real exploits seen in the wild and to suggest solutions for programs not equipped with ASLR yet.

This month we release five bulletins to address 23 unique CVEs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Silverlight. If you need to prioritize, the update for Internet Explorer addresses the issue first described in Security Advisory 2934088, so it should be at the top of your list. While that update does warrant your attention, I want to also call out another impactful update.