Today, as part of our regular monthly security bulletin release cycle, we released 10 bulletins to address 34 total vulnerabilities in Windows, Microsoft Office (including SharePoint), Internet Explorer (IE), Internet Information Services (IIS), and the .NET Framework. Only three of these bulletins get our maximum severity rating of Critical. The rest are rated Important. However, we encourage customers to test and deploy all applicable security updates as soon as possible.

The three Critical bulletins get our highest deployment priority this month. Those are:

• MS10-033 is a remote code execution vulnerability in both Quartz.dll and Asycfilt.dll and is rated Critical on all supported versions of Windows. Specially crafted media files could trigger the vulnerability when a user visits a web page or opens a malicious file.
• MS10-034 is a cumulative update for ActiveX Kill Bits and is Critical on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7. There are two Microsoft controls we are applying Kill Bits for. Those are the Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools control, and the Data Analyzer ActiveX control. The latter control is not installed by default. In addition, there are Kill Bits for four third-party controls. Please review the bulletin for additional details.
• MS10-035 is a cumulative update for Internet Explorer. Of the six vulnerabilities addressed in the bulletin, only one, an information disclosure vulnerability, is publicly known. This issue was identified in Security Advisory 980088. We remain unaware of any active attacks against this vulnerability.

In the video below, Adrian Stone and I go in to some detail on the three priority bulletins and explain why each should be at the top of your list to install:

Also, included below is the aggregate risk and impact slide for June. Note that we do not typically give an Exploitability Index rating for ActiveX Kill Bits but as stated, this update should be a high priority.

Here is our overall deployment priority information:

There are additional subtleties with specific bulletins that I want to discuss here to eliminate potential confusion:

• MS10-032 is an elevation of privilege issue in the affected Microsoft products. There is a potential remote vector if applications fail to properly request the length of the buffer when calling the affected API. All Microsoft applications make this call properly but there may be applications out there that do not. Regardless, installing this update addresses the issue for all vectors. See our Security Research & Defense (SRD) blog for more details on this one.
• MS10-036 is a COM validation update. The issue could result in an attack through ActiveX in Office applications. This is not a new attack vector but the underlying vulnerability is and the bulletin addresses it. For additional clarification, I want to point out that Office XP does not have the architecture needed for the update. However, for customers running Office XP on Windows XP or newer operating systems, we have made a shim available that protects against the vulnerability. The shim can be installed via a Microsoft FixIt which can be downloaded from KB983235.
• MS10-039 is a SharePoint related update, closing out Security Advisory 983438 which addressed an elevation of privilege vulnerability. We are not currently aware of any attacks against this issue.

As usual, our SRD team has written several blog posts that go in to details on some of this month's bulletins and I encourage customers to review those for additional insight: http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd.

If you have questions about the June bulletins, please attend our public webcast tomorrow which I will be hosting with Adrian Stone from the MSRC. We will go in to additional details on each bulletin and along with a room full of subject matter experts attempt to address all of your questions. Here's how to register:

When: Wednesday June 10, 2010 at 11:00 a.m. PDT (UTC -7)
Registration: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032395226

I hope you can join us then.

Thanks!

Jerry Bryant
Group Manager, Response Communications

Follow us on Twitter: @MSFTSecResponse

Customers running SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint Services 3.0 are encouraged to review and apply the mitigations and workarounds discussed in the Security Advisory. These include restricting access to the SharePoint help.aspx XML files and enabling the Internet Explorer 8 XSS filter in the intranet zone.

We are actively working with partners in our Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) to provide information that they can use to provide broader protections to customers.

As always, Microsoft strives to work with security researchers to address vulnerabilities in our software. This helps ensure that customers receive comprehensive, high-quality updates before cyber criminals learn of – and work to exploit – a vulnerability. Responsible disclosure protects the computer ecosystem and individual computer users from harm.

Anyone believed to have been affected by this issue can visit: http://support.microsoft.com and should contact the national law enforcement agency in their country. 

We will continue to share updates on this blog and through our Twitter feed (@msftsecresponse).

Thanks,

Jerry Bryant
Group Manager, Response Communications

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Shortly after we released the update we received several reports that it did not protect against the vulnerability reported to us. At that time, we pulled the update and notified customers. The main reason for pulling the update was to save a reboot for customers who had not yet installed it. The original issue was missed due to focusing on a variant of the original report early in the investigation. We are addressing this issue and plan to re-release the update next week.

Once we are sure of the exact day the update will be ready for re-release, we will post that information to our Twitter account: @MSFTSecResponse. This will go out as a major revision to the bulletin so there will be no advance notification mailer going out but those who have subscribed to our comprehensive notification service will receive an email when it is released. Subscribe here.

In the meantime, we continue to encourage customers who have Windows Media Services installed on Windows 2000 Server to review the mitigations and workarounds in the bulletin and to apply firewall best practices to reduce exposure.

Thanks,

Jerry Bryant
Group Manager, Response Communications

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*

MS10-025 is a security update that only affects Windows 2000 Server customers who have installed Windows Media Services (this is a non-default configuration). Today we pulled the update because we found it does not address the underlying issue effectively. We are not aware of any active attacks seeking to exploit this issue and are targeting a re-release of the update for next week.

Customers should review the bulletin for mitigations and workarounds and those with internet facing systems with Windows Media Services installed should evaluate and use firewall best practices to limit their overall exposure. We will continue to share updates here on the blog as available.

We wanted to provide a quick update on the threat landscape and announce that we will release a security update out-of-band to help protect customers from this vulnerability.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Based on our comprehensive monitoring of the threat landscape we continue to see very limited, and in some cases, targeted attacks.  To date, the only successful attacks that we are aware of have been against Internet Explorer 6.  We continue to recommend customers update to Internet Explorer 8 to benefit from the improved security protection it offers.  We also recommend customers consider deploying the workarounds and mitigations provided in  Security Advisory 979352.

Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability.

We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update out-of-band update is the right decision at this time.  We will provide the specific timing of the release tomorrow.

As always, we’re continuing to investigate this situation, so customers should look for the latest updates here on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

Thank you,

George Stathakopoulos
General Manager
Trustworthy Computing Security

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*

Hi Everyone,

We hope that 2010 is off to a good start for you. For our first bulletin release of the New Year, we have one Critical bulletin affecting all versions of Windows. The bulletin, MS10-001, addresses one vulnerability in the Embedded OpenType Font Engine and is Critical on Windows 2000. For all other versions of Windows, the vulnerability gets a Low rating.

We’ve given the bulletin an aggregate rating of “2” on our Exploitability Index. This applies to Windows 2000 systems. All other systems are rated “3”. The vulnerable code is present on newer operating systems but through the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), there are several mitigations in place that help prevent the likelihood of exploitation. Our Security Research & Defense (SRD) team has a great write up on this in their blog. We do recommend that customers evaluate and deploy this update as soon as possible. Especially those on Windows 2000.

The following risk and impact slide reflects the aggregate severity and exploitability index rating for this bulletin:

As you can see from our Deployment Priority slide, we give this a “2” based on the lower exploitability index rating and the Low severity and mitigations on most of the affected platforms:

We also want to mention that we re-released MS09-035, an Active Template Library (ATL) bulletin that was released out-of-band in July 2009. Today, we added Windows Embedded CE 6.0 to the affected products list. I want to be clear that this rerelease affects only developers and OEMs building applications on top of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 or producing devices that use the operating system. For end users, no action is required. The vulnerable components were found during our ongoing investigation around ATL and we determined there are no known attack vectors. The update package, KB974616, will only be offered through the Microsoft Download Center.

Additionally, we released Security Advisory 979267 to increase awareness among customers regarding reports of vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player 6 which shipped with Windows XP. Given support ended in 2006 for Adobe Flash Player 6, Microsoft and Adobe recommend that customers uninstall this version and/or update to the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Customers should note that Adobe addressed these vulnerabilities in newer versions of its software.

There are multiple ways to remove Adobe Flash Player 6 on Windows XP systems. For directions on the manual steps required to remove Adobe Flash Player 6 visit http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/127/tn_12727.html. Adobe also provides an uninstaller tool that removes all versions of the Flash player which you can find here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html. NOTE: the uninstaller tool removes all versions of Flash and is not specific to Adobe Flash Player 6.

Please view the following video for more information about the updates we released today:

More viewing and listening options: Windows Media Video (WMV) Windows Media Audio (WMA) iPod Video (MP4) MP3 Audio High Quality WMV (2.5 Mbps) Zune Video (WMV)

Today, we also added Win32/Rimecud to our Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT). This is a prevalent family of Worms that spread through fixed and removable drives in addition to Instant Messaging software.

For our live webcast tomorrow, I will be joined by Dustin Childs, security program manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), who manages many of the Windows security updates from initial report to releasing the update. We will go into the full details of this month’s bulletin release and encourage you to bring your questions where Dustin and I will cover them live on the air. Here are the registration details:

Date: Wednesday Jan 13
Time: 11:00 a.m. PST (UTC -8)
Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032427677

On a final note, I want to call out that this year we will reach end of life on three Windows products/Service Packs:

• Windows XP Service Pack 2 will no longer be supported as of July 13, 2010. Many customers are still on this version so we encourage upgrading to Service Pack 3 or to Windows 7 as soon as possible.
• Windows Vista RTM will no longer be supported as of April 13, 2010. Service Pack 1 will still be supported until July 12, 2011 but we recommend customers update to Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 at this time.
• Extended support for Windows 2000 will also be retired on July 13, 2010. At that time, we will no longer provide security or any other updated for Windows 2000.

It is important that customers stay current with the latest updates and Service Packs. For information on our support lifecycle policies and lifecycle information by product, please visit www.microsoft.com/lifecycle.

Thanks!

Jerry Bryant

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*

On Dec. 23 we were made aware of a new claim of a vulnerability in Internet Information Services (IIS). We are still investigating this issue and are not aware of any active attacks but wanted to let customers know that our initial assessment shows that the IIS web server must be in a non-default, unsafe configuration in order to be vulnerable. An attacker would have to be authenticated and have write access to a directory on the web server with execute permissions which does not align with best practices or guidance Microsoft provides for secure server configuration. Customers using out of the box configurations and who follow security best practices are at reduced risk of being impacted by issues like this.

Once we’re done investigating, we will take appropriate action to help protect customers. This may include providing a security update through the monthly release process, an out-of-cycle update or additional guidance to help customers protect themselves.

This vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed to Microsoft and may put customers at risk. We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities as we believe reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone's best interests. This practice helps to ensure that customers receive comprehensive, high-quality updates for security vulnerabilities without exposure to malicious attackers while the update is being developed.

I want to close by providing some resources and best practices for securely configuring IIS servers:

IIS 6.0 Security Best Practices
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc782762(WS.10).aspx

Securing Sites with Web Site Permissions
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756133(WS.10).aspx

IIS 6.0 Operations Guide
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785089(WS.10).aspx

Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms994921.aspx

Thanks,

Jerry Bryant

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*

Today, we released six security bulletins addressing a total of 15 vulnerabilities. Four affect Windows and Windows Server and two affect Microsoft Office products (Excel and Word).

As we do every month, we have prepared our Risk & Impact and our Deployment Priority guidance to help customers assess risk to their environments and prioritize the deployment of this month’s updates. Risk & Impact is a snapshot of the cumulative severity and exploitability index ratings for each bulletin. This month, MS09-065 is the only bulletin with a critical severity rating and an Exploitability Index rating of 1 (“Consistent Exploit Code Likely”). This bulletin provides updates for three vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers. We recommend customers prioritize and deploy this update immediately.

To better demonstrate the affected products and important aspects of MS09-065, I am including a more detailed overview slide (below). As you can see, only one of the three vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-2514) is critical. That vulnerability only affects Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2 and SP3, and Windows Server 2003 SP2 (it does not affect Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 so if you are using either of these platforms, you can lower the deployment priority to a two). The vulnerability was publicly disclosed and could be used to create a malicious web page which could potentially exploit vulnerable systems just by visiting the website. The other two vulnerabilities are Elevation of Privilege (EoP) which would require the attacker to have valid logon credentials in order to be able to exploit.

The following deployment priority guidance is based on a combination of severity rating, exploitability index rating, available mitigations and workarounds and range of affected products. All customers should perform their own prioritization assessment as each environment is different and other factors may apply. Microsoft recommends that all security updates be deployed as soon as possible.

· MS09-063 affects Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. There is a potential for unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) but only from the local subnet. Attacks cannot originate from outside of the network. This mitigation along with the exploitability index rating of 2 lowers the deployment priority. Obviously, this is still a critical bulletin so customers should deploy as soon as possible.

· MS09-064 affects only Windows 2000 Server SP4. This one also has the potential for unauthenticated RCE between systems running the License Logging Service. This service is enabled by default on Windows 2000 Server so this deployment priority should be moved up for customers who have Windows 2000 servers on public-facing networks.

· MS09-067 and MS09-068 both have similar attack vectors. A user would have to open a maliciously crafted Excel or Word file developed to exploit these vulnerabilities. Users of Office XP or later will be prompted to Open, Save, or Cancel before opening a document. These mitigations lower the severity and deployment priority. However, users should never open file attachments they receive in emails from unknown sources and should always question attachments from known sources if they are unexpected.

Adrian Stone from the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) and I give a brief overview of this month’s bulletin release in the video below.

More listening and viewing options: Windows Media Video (WMV) Windows Media Audio (WMA) iPod Video (MP4) MP3 Audio High Quality WMV (2.5 Mbps) Zune Video (WMV)

For more in-depth technical detail on MS09-063, MS09-064 and MS09-065, please visit our Security Research & Defense team blog at this link.

We also re-released MS09-045 and MS09-051. The former was re-released to add detection for users who may be running JScript 5.7 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 machines and the latter is a re-release of the update for Audio Compression Manager on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 to fix a detection issue.

As always, we encourage all customers to join us for our live security bulletin webcast which we conduct every month after release. Adrian and I will go in to detail on each bulletin and, along with a room full of subject matter experts, answer all of your questions live. So if you can, please join us tomorrow, Nov 11 at 11:00 a.m. PDT (UTC -8). You can register for the webcast at this link.

The last item I want to mention this month is that the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) team has added Win32/fakevimes and Win32/privacycenter to the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) this month. Please check their blog post for more information.

Thanks!

Jerry Bryant

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*

This month, we released 13 new bulletins which address 33 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Since we published this information in our advance notification (ANS) last Thursday, we have been asked “is this the most bulletins Microsoft has ever released”? The short answer to that question is yes. However, we have, on several occasions, released between 10 and 12 bulletins so this is business as usual. All of our updates go through extensive quality testing and when they reach the bar for broad distribution, we schedule them for release.

As we noted in the ANS last week, two of the updates address open Security Advisories. MS09-050 addresses the SMBv2 issue in Security Advisory 975497 and MS09-053 addresses the IIS issue discussed in Security Advisory 975191.

Another issue being addressed this month that has received some public attention has to do with security certificates used for authentication. The vulnerabilities being addressed by Security Bulletin MS09-056 could allow spoofing if an attacker gains access to the certificate used by the end user for authentication. We are aware that a rogue certificate was distributed in a public forum but we are not aware of any attempts to use this to attack users.

Below is the severity summary and exploitability index for the 13 new bulletins. We also refer to this as the overall risk and impact summary. As you can see, eight of the bulletins have a rating of Critical. Of those eight, six have an exploitability index rating of 1, which means we believe it is highly likely that we will see exploit code in the wild within the first 30 days from the date of release.

To help with deployment planning, we started publishing our guidance (beginning last month) on which bulletins should be considered first for deployment. Obviously one size does not fit all and each customer will need to consider their own unique situations in addition to this guidance. Our approach is to take a combination of the severity, the exploitability index rating, the range of products affected, and potential mitigations to group these in to a priority 1, 2 or 3. Our Security Research & Defense team, who represent some of the best security researchers in the world, play a key role in this every month as well.

Most of this month’s updates require a restart, so please refer to the bulletins when you’re planning your deployment to ensure you’re fully protected. We want to specifically note that MS09-050 requires a restart but will not prompt you to do so if you install the update manually.

As we do every month, Adrian Stone and I provide a high-level overview of this month’s bulletin release in the following video:

Other listening and viewing options: Windows Media Video (WMV) Windows Media Audio (WMA) iPod Video (MP4) MP3 Audio High Quality WMV (2.5 Mbps) Zune Video (WMV)

This month we are also re-releasing MS08-069, vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services could allow remote code execution (955218) to add detection for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This component does not ship with these platforms but many applications install it in order to use its functionality.

Finally, you may also notice a change in the severity rating since the advance notification for several versions of Windows in the .NET bulletin (MS09-061). We have elevated the severity of these products from Important to Critical. We do not typically make changes after the advance notification goes out but during our ongoing investigation to protect customers, we determined that this was the appropriate rating for these products when certain versions of the .NET Framework are installed on them.

We encourage all customers to join us tomorrow when Adrian and I will go in to detail on each bulletin and, along with a room full of subject matter experts, answer all of your questions live. So if you can, please join us at 11:00 a.m. PDT (UTC -7). You can register for the webcast at this link.

Thanks!

Jerry Bryant

Update – Resource links:

• Assessing the risk of the October security bulletins – Security Research & Defense blog
• MS09-051: A note on the affected platforms – Security Research & Defense blog
• MS09-050: Exploit timeline for SMB2 RCE vulnerability – Security Research & Defense blog
• MS09-054: Extra info on the attack surface for the IE security bulletin – Security Research & Defense blog
• MS09-061: More information about the .NET security bulletin – Security Research & Defense blog
• Scanti-ly Clad – Another Rogue Stripped by MSRT – Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog

Update (10/13) Changed the number of vulnerabilities addressed to 33 from 34. CVE-2009-2493 was counted in both MS09-055 and MS09-060.

*This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights*