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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.

On October 1, 2003, Microsoft announced it would move to a monthly security bulletin cadence. Today, marks 10 years since that first monthly security update. We looked at many ways to improve our security preparedness and patch timing was the number one customer request. Your feedback was clear and we delivered a predictable schedule.

Today we’re publishing the October 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We fielded 11 questions during the webcast, with specific bulletin questions focusing primarily on the SharePoint (MS13-084) and Kernel-Mode Drivers (MS13-081) bulletins. There was one additional question that we were unable to answer on air, and we have included a response to that question on the Q&A page.

Congratulations to James Forshaw for coming up with a new exploitation technique to get our first ever $100,000 bounty. A security vulnerability researcher with Context Information Security, James already came in hot with design level bugs he found during the IE11 Preview Bug Bounty, and we’re thrilled to give him even more money for helping us improve our platform-wide security by leaps.

Today we released MS13-080 which addresses nine CVEs in Internet Explorer. This bulletin fixes multiple security issues, including two critical vulnerabilities that haven been actively exploited in limited targeted attacks, which we will discuss in details in this blog entry. CVE-2013-3893: the final patch after Fix it workaround Previously, Microsoft released Security Advisory 2887505 and made available the Fix it workaround 51001 to provide earlier protection to all customers for an actively exploited security issue that was reported to us.

Back in June of this year, we announced three new bounty programs that will pay researchers for techniques that bypass built-in OS mitigations and protections, for defenses that stop those bypasses and for vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 11 Preview. This past Friday, we provided some additional details about the results of the IE11 Preview bounty program, which covered the first 30 days of the preview period.

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,