#microsoft

Apache OpenOffice.org (OOo) before 4.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact via invalid PLCF data in a DOC document file.

Apache OpenOffice.org (OOo) before 4.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted element in an OOXML document file.

August 2014 Update: The BlueHat Challenge is on hold. We will make an announcement on this blog when we re-start the BlueHat Challenge. Thanks for your interest! —- We were inspired by the Matasano Crypto Challenges. So we built a similar series of fun challenges to exercise reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, and web browser manipulation attack concepts.

Today we are kicking off a new challenge so you can showcase your security prowess and, if we can, help you build some more. Our BlueHat Challenge is a series of computer security questions, which increase in difficulty as you progress. Only the rare and talented engineer will be able to finish the Challenge on the first attempt.

Over the years, our customers have come to expect a certain regularity and transparency in both our security updates and the guidance that goes with them. One regular piece of communication about our work is a yearly progress report, which provides a look into the program updates and bulletin statistics from the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).

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.

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.

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.

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.