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Over the past ten months we have paid out over $200,000 USD in bounties. This collaboration with the research community has resulted in significant improvements in Edge security and has allowed us to offer more proactive security for our customers. Keeping in line with our philosophy of protecting customers and proactively partnering with researchers, today we are changing the Edge on Windows Insider Preview (WIP) bounty program from a time bound to a sustained bounty program.

Is this thing still on? It’s been a while since we’ve posted to this blog and we think it’s time to start posting deep technical content about Security Research & Defense (SRD) again. For readers who are new or may have forgotten, this blog is the home of the MSRC Vulnerabilities & Mitigations engineering team.

Microsoft releases additional updates for older platforms to protect against potential nation-state activity Today, as part of our regular Update Tuesday schedule, we have taken action to provide additional critical security updates to address vulnerabilities that are at heightened risk of exploitation due to past nation-state activity and disclosures. Some of the releases today are new, and some are for older platforms under custom support agreements, that we are making publicly available today.

Calling security professionals and enthusiasts throughout the world. Microsoft is pleased to open the Call for Papers for our BlueHat v17 Security Conference. Potential speakers have from June 1st through August 18th to submit abstract proposals for this unique opportunity. As in past events, we are looking for individuals to challenge the thinking and actions we do in security as well as join the community discussion on the current threat landscape that is impacting our customers.

Over the past 10 months, we’ve paid out more than $200,000 USD in bounties to researchers reporting vulnerabilities through the Microsoft Edge Bounty Program. Partnering with the research community has helped improve Microsoft Edge security, and to continue this collaboration, today we’re extending the end date of the Edge on Windows Insider Preview (WIP) bounty program to June 30, 2017.

Microsoft solution available to protect additional products Today many of our customers around the world and the critical systems they depend on were victims of malicious “WannaCrypt” software. Seeing businesses and individuals affected by cyberattacks, such as the ones reported today, was painful. Microsoft worked throughout the day to ensure we understood the attack and were taking all possible actions to protect our customers.

Today’s security updates include three updates that exemplify how the security ecosystem can come together to help protect consumers and enterprises. We would like to thank FireEye and ESET for working with us. Customers that have the latest security updates installed are protected against the attacks described below. As a best practice to ensure customers have the latest protections, we recommend they upgrade to the most current versions.

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.

The Security Update Guide has been in public preview since November 2016. This month marked our first release when security update information was published entirely in the new format. Over the last few months, customers and partners have provided a lot of feedback on the direction and implementation of the Security Update Guide.

Security is a critical component of our products at Microsoft. A strong emphasis on security is a persistent factor throughout our entire development process. Microsoft is committed to designing and developing secure software. Testing is performed both internally and by working closely with the broader security community. This is done through a wide range of partnerships and programs including bug bounties to ensure that customers receive the most secure products.