#microsoft

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.

Recently we become aware of a vulnerability of a Microsoft graphics component that is actively exploited in targeted attacks using crafted Word documents sent by email. Today we are releasing Security Advisory 2896666 which includes a proactive Fix it workaround for blocking this attack while we are working on the final update.

Today we released Security Advisory 2896666 regarding an issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office 2003 through 2010, and all supported versions of Microsoft Lync. We are aware of targeted attacks, largely in the Middle East and South Asia. The current versions of Microsoft Windows and Office are not affected by this issue.

Those who know me personally or follow me on Twitter are familiar with my obsession with karaoke. I do it as often as I can rope people into going with me, never forcing anyone to sing, though invariably everyone does – or at least sings from the sidelines to the songs they know.

Heap corruption vulnerabilities are the most common type of vulnerability that Microsoft addresses through security updates today. These vulnerabilities typically occur as a result of programming mistakes that make it possible to write beyond the bounds of a heap buffer (a spatial issue) or to place a heap allocated object in an unexpected state such as by using the object after it has been freed (a temporal issue).

By way of introduction, I am Chris Betz, the leader of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). I’m stepping in to fill the shoes of Mike Reavey, who has moved on to become the General Manager of Secure Operations, still within Trustworthy Computing. Since joining the MSRC, I’ve spent time immersed in learning the business, meeting our global team of security research and response professionals and many of the other teams we frequently interact with here at Microsoft.