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The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, best known as EMET, helps raise the bar against attackers gaining access to computer systems. Since the first release of EMET in 2009, our customers and the security community have adopted EMET and provided us with valuable feedback. Feedback both in forums and through Microsoft Premier Support Services, which provides enterprise support for EMET, has helped shape the new EMET capabilities to further expand the range of scenarios it addresses.

We’ve received a number of customer inquiries about the workaround steps documented in Security Advisory 2963983 published on Saturday evening. We hope this blog post answers those questions. Steps you can take to stay safe The security advisory lists several options customers can take to stay safe. Those options are (in summary):

Today, we released Security Advisory 2963983 regarding an issue that impacts Internet Explorer. At this time, we are only aware of limited, targeted attacks. This issue allows remote code execution if users visit a malicious website with an affected browser. This would typically occur by an attacker convincing someone to click a link in an email or instant message.

Today we released Security Advisory 2963983 regarding a potential vulnerability in Internet Explorer reported by FireEye and currently under investigation. We are working closely with FireEye to investigate this report of a vulnerability which was found used in very limited targeted attack: - the vulnerability is a “use-after-free” memory corruption and the exploit observed seems to target IE9, IE10 and IE11;

Today we published the April 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. We answered 13 questions in total, with the majority focusing on the update for Internet Explorer (MS14-018) and the Windows 8.1 Update (KB2919355). Two questions that were not answered on air have been included on the Q&A page.

T. S. Elliot once said, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” So as we put one season to bed, let’s start another by looking at the April security updates. Today, we release four bulletins to address 11 CVEs in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

Today we released four security bulletins addressing 11 unique CVE’s. Two bulletins have a maximum severity rating of Critical while the other two have a maximum severity rating of Important. We hope that the table below helps you prioritize the deployment of the updates appropriately for your environment. Bulletin Most likely attack vector Max Bulletin Severity Max exploitability Likely first 30 days impact Platform mitigations and key notes MS14-017(Word) Victim opens a malicious RTF or DOC/DOCX file.

Command (.cmd) and batch (.bat) files can be directly provided as input to the CreateProcess as if it is an executable. CreateProcess uses the cmd.exe automatically to run the input .cmd or .bat. Today, with the bulletin MS14-019 we are fixing a vulnerability, where in particular scenario it is possible to hijack the cmd.

Today we provide advance notification for the release of four bulletins, two rated Critical and two rated Important in severity. These updates address issues in Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer. The update provided through MS14-017 fully addresses the Microsoft Word issue first described in Security Advisory 2953095. This advisory also included a Fix it to disable opening rich-text format (RTF) files within Microsoft Word.

It is often said that attackers have an advantage, because the defenders have to protect every part of their systems all the time, while the attacker only has to find one way in. This argument oversimplifies the security landscape and the real strength that defenders can achieve if they work together.