For providers

September is here! The dash from the close of the call for papers to now has been amazing. We had nearly two hundred submissions spanning the gamut of security topics and presenters. The result is a solid schedule that will challenge and educate all attendees. On behalf of the content advisory board, I want to thank everyone who submitted a paper for consideration.

Since we last wrote about the future of EMET and how it relates to Windows 10 back in November 2016 (see Moving Beyond EMET), we have received lots of invaluable feedback from EMET customers and enthusiasts regarding the upcoming EMET end of life. Based on that feedback, we are excited to share significant new exploit protection and threat mitigation improvements coming with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update!

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. By default, Windows 10 receives these updates automatically, and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

Security researchers play an essential role in Microsoft’s security strategy and are key to community-based defense. To show our appreciation for their hard work and partnership, each year at BlackHat North America, the Microsoft Security Response Center highlights contributions of these researchers through the list of “Top 100” security researchers reporting to Microsoft.

Windows 10 represents the best and newest in our strong commitment to security with world-class mitigations. One of Microsoft’s longstanding strategies toward improving software security involves investing in defensive technologies that make it difficult and costly for attackers to find, exploit and leverage vulnerabilities. We built in mitigations and defenses such as DEP, ASLR, CFG, CIG, ACG, Device Guard, and Credential Guard to harden our systems and we continue adding defenses such as Windows Defender Application Guard to significantly increase protection to harden entry points while ensuring the customer experience is seamless.

Introduction We are continuing our series of blog posts dissecting the exploits released by ShadowBrokers in April 2017. After the first two posts about the SMB exploits known as EternalChampion and EternalSynergy, we’ll move this time to analyze a different tool and we’ll focus on the exploit named EnglishmansDentist designed to target Exchange Server 2003.

Introduction Recently we announced a series of blog posts dissecting the exploits released by the ShadowBrokers in April 2017; specifically some of the less explored exploits. This week we are going to take a look at Eternal Synergy, an SMBv1 authenticated exploit. This one is particularly interesting because many of the exploitation steps are purely packet-based, as opposed to local shellcode execution.

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. By default, Windows 10 receives these updates automatically, and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide.

Recently, a group named the ShadowBrokers published several remote server exploits targeting various protocols on older versions of Windows. In this post we are going to look at the EternalChampion exploit in detail to see what vulnerabilities it exploited, how it exploited them, and how the latest mitigations in Windows 10 break the exploit as-written.

As happened recently with WannaCrypt, we again face a malicious attack in the form of ransomware, Petya. In early reports, there was a lot of conflicting information reported on the attacks, including conflation of unrelated and misleading pieces of data, so Microsoft teams mobilized to investigate and analyze, enabling our Malware Protection team to release signatures to detect and protect against the malware.