For individuals

As I previously mentioned in the Advance Notification blog on Thursday, today we are releasing two security bulletins, both of which are rated Important. These bulletins will increase protection by addressing two unique vulnerabilities in the following Microsoft products: MS12-061 (Visual Studio Team Foundation Server) This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

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Today, we published Security Advisory 2743314, which provides guidance that will help protect customers from a technique that could allow a man-in-the middle attack to obtain a user’s domain credentials when VPN is configured to use PPTP and MSCHAPv2. Customers concerned with this scenario are advised to review the guidance described in the advisory to help protect themselves.

Hello. Today we’re publishing the August 2012 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. During the webcast, we fielded twelve questions focusing primarily on MS12-060 covering Windows Common Controls, MS12-052 regarding Internet Explorer, and Security Advisory 2661254 addressing trust certificates with RSA keys less than 1024 bit key lengths. Three additional questions were answered after the webcast.

Security Advisory 2661254 - Update For Minimum Certificate Key Length Before we get into the details of this month’s bulletin release, let’s take a look at an important change on how Windows deals with certificates that have RSA keys of less than 1024 bits in length. We’ve been talking about this subject since June, and today we are announcing the availability of an update to Windows that restricts the use of certificates with RSA keys less than 1024 bits in length with Security Advisory 2661254.

Today we’re providing advanced notification on the release of nine bulletins, five Critical and four Important, for August 2012. The five Critical security bulletins are addressing ten vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Exchange, SQL Server, Server Software, and Developer Tools. The bulletin for Exchange will address the issue first described in Security Advisory 2737111.

Minutes ago in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Researcher Appreciation Party, we completed the journey we set out on together at the 2011 Black Hat briefings. There, we asked the security research community to focus its talent and expertise on defense, to design and prototype novel runtime mitigation technologies to prevent the successful exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.

One year ago this week we challenged the security community to take an unconventional focus on defensive innovation. We called that challenge the BlueHat Prize, and tomorrow night, we will award the grand prize of $200,000 to one of the finalists, either Jared DeMott, Ivan Fratric, or Vasilis Pappas. All three finalists submitted prototype mitigations that help prevent exploits that use Return Oriented Programming (ROP) techniques.

Hello – Today we published Security Advisory 2737111, which provides mitigations and workarounds that will help protect customers from a known vulnerability in one of Oracle’s Outside In libraries, which were updated earlier this month. Microsoft licenses the libraries from Oracle and uses them in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

In a little less than 24 hours, we will award $200,000 to Jared DeMott, Ivan Fratric, or Vasilis Pappas as we name the inaugural winner of the BlueHat Prize – and we’ll award more than $50,000 for the two runners-up. As excitement builds towards that announcement, I was fortunate enough to sit down with each finalist and get to know them a little bit better.