#rce

There are times when we get too close to a topic. We familiarize ourselves with every aspect and nuance, but fail to recognize not everyone else has done the same. Whether you consider this myopia, navel-gazing, or human nature, the effect is the same. I recognized this during the recent webcast when someone asked the question – “What’s the difference between a security advisory and a security bulletin?

Today we released Security Advisory 2914486 regarding a local elevation of privilege (EoP) issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003. Windows Vista and later are not affected by this local EoP issue. A member of the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) found this issue being used on systems compromised by a third-party remote code execution vulnerability.

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.

Over the weekend we became aware of an active attack relying on an unknown remote code execution vulnerability of a legacy ActiveX component used by Internet Explorer. We are releasing this blog to confirm one more time that the code execution vulnerability will be fixed in today’s UpdateTuesday release and to clarify some details about the second vulnerability reported.

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).

Today we released Security Advisory 2887505 regarding an issue that affects Internet Explorer. There are only reports of a limited number of targeted attacks specifically directed at Internet Explorer 8 and 9, although the issue could potentially affect all supported versions. This issue could allow remote code execution if an affected system browses to a website containing malicious content directed towards the specific browser type.

Helen Hunt Jackson famously wrote, “By all lovely tokens September is here, with summer’s best of weather and autumn’s best of cheer.” I share Helen’s clear adoration for this time of year. As a sports fan, there are so many “lovely tokens” to enjoy. The baseball pennant race is heating up, college and pro football are underway, and various soccer leagues (real football to the rest of the world) continue.

MS13-068 addresses a memory corruption vulnerability accessible by simply previewing a message in the Outlook Preview Pane. As such, we’ve rated this security vulnerability as Critical and we encourage customers to deploy the security update. However, in this case, we believe this particular vulnerability will be difficult to exploit for code execution.

Two weeks ago I, along with 7,500 of my closest friends, attended the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, NV. I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly had a great – if not exhausting – time while there. While there were a lot of great talks, a personal highlight for me each year is the chance to meet and talk with the various people who attend.

C++ supports developers in object-orientated programming and removes from the developer the responsibility of dealing with many object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm problems. But these problems do not magically disappear. Rather it is the compiler that aims to provide a solution to many of the complexities that arise from C++ objects, virtual methods, inheritance etc.