For individuals

@TODO: Exciting changes are coming to BlueHat Seattle 2019! If you’d like to attend this premier security conference, we have good news for you: registration for BlueHat Seattle is now open and we hope you register. Wait, isn’t BlueHat invitation-only? It is…but if we haven’t sent you an invitation, we encourage you to request a seat.

In the past year we invested a lot of time making Hyper-V research more accessible to everyone. Our first blog post, “First Steps in Hyper-V Research”, describes the tools and setup for debugging the hypervisor and examines the interesting attack surfaces of the virtualization stack components. We then published “Fuzzing para-virtualized devices in Hyper-V”, which has been the focus of our friends at the Virtualization Security Team.

We have released the September security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide. As a reminder, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be out of extended support and no longer receiving updates as of January 14, 2020.

In a previous post we described some of the differences between on-premises/physical forensics and cyber investigations and those performed in the cloud, and how this can make cloud forensics challenging. That blog post described a method of creating and maintaining a VM image which can be distributed to multiple regions, allowing you to deploy this pre-prepared machine to be used in an investigation in a matter of minutes.

2019 has seen a phenomenal BlueHatIL in February followed by a wildly successful BlueHat Shanghai in May… now it’s time to come back home for BlueHat Seattle! 2 days of hands-on technical training (October 22-23, 2019) 2 days of conference talks from industry-leading security researchers and cyber defenders (October 24-25, 2019) great creative spaces ready to spark thought-provoking conversations and collaborative partnerships The Call for Papers (CFP) for BlueHat Seattle 2019 is now open through September 20, 2019.

Traditional computer forensics and cyber investigations are as relevant in the cloud as they are in on-premise environments, but the methods in which to access and perform such investigations differ. This post will describe some of the challenges of bringing on-premises forensics techniques to the cloud and show one solution to overcome these challenges, using Azure functionality.

This week, we released the first Beta preview of the next version of Microsoft Edge. Alongside this, Microsoft is excited to announce the launch of the Microsoft Edge Insider Bounty Program. We welcome researchers to seek out and disclose any high impact vulnerabilities they may find in the next version of Microsoft Edge, based on Chromium, and offer rewards up to US$30,000 for eligible vulnerabilities in Dev and Beta channels.

We have released the August security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide. As a reminder, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be out of extended support and no longer receiving updates as of January 14, 2020.

Today Microsoft released a set of fixes for Remote Desktop Services that include two critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182. Like the previously-fixed ‘BlueKeep’ vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708), these two vulnerabilities are also ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits these could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer without user interaction.

Today Microsoft announced the MAPP program Top Vulnerability Contributors, Top Threat Indicator Submitters, and Top Zero-Day Reporting for the period of July 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019. The Microsoft Active Protections Program provides security and protection to customers through cooperation and collaboration with industry leading partners. While all MAPP partners have made a significant impact on the security ecosystem and are commended for their customer-first approach to security, these top contributors have gone above and beyond our expectations.