Microsoft Bounty Program Updates: Faster bounty review, faster payments, and higher rewards

In 2018 The Microsoft Bounty Program awarded over $2,000,000 to encourage and reward external security research in key technologies to protect our customers. Building on that success, we are excited to announce a number of improvements in our bounty programs to better serve the security research...

Annual Protest Raises $250K to Cure Krebs

For the second year in a row, denizens of a large German-language online forum have donated more than USD $250,000 to cancer research organizations in protest of a story KrebsOnSecurity published in 2018 that unmasked the creators of Coinhive, a now-defunct cryptocurrency mining service that was...

Real World Examples Demonstrating the Need for Mature Threat Hunting

A recent article discussed the keys to becoming a level 4 maturity threat hunting program. This article will bring these concepts into the real world by discussing examples of attacks that required that high level of threat hunting maturity to find them and defend against them. The case studies...

Guardicore Threat Intelligence Helps Cybersecurity Community Research Attacks and Mitigate Risks

This post discusses how Guardicore Labs helps Guardicore customers and the security community enhance their security posture...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Research on Squid Camouflage

From the New York Times: Now, a paper published last week in Nature Communications suggests that their chromatophores, previously thought to be mainly pockets of pigment embedded in their skin, are also equipped with tiny reflectors made of proteins. These reflectors aid the squid to produce such...

Exploit for Link Following in Microsoft

Security Research for FUN All focused on Microsoft Windows OS...

Years-Long Phishing Campaign Targets Saudi Gov Agencies

An ongoing three-year-old phishing campaign has been targeting the credentials of Saudi Arabian government agencies — with a financially motivated actor the likely culprit. The campaign, code-named “Bad Tidings,” has siphoned victims’ credentials by pretending to be the Kingdom’s Ministry of...

SilkETW: Because Free Telemetry is … Free!

Over time people have had an on-again, off-again interest in Event Tracing for Windows ETW. ETW, first introduced in Windows 2000, is a lightweight Kernel level tracing facility that was originally intended for debugging, diagnostics and performance. Gradually, however, defenders realized that ET...

Beers with Talos Ep. #49: POS Malware, RSA Highlights, and SOL OpSec Fails

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Ep. 49 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Recorded March 15, 2019. We recorded this after coming back from RSA, with some on-location highlights included. This episode ope...

File Upload Vulnerability in Super CMS

Super CMS content management system by the SEO Research Center moonseo.cn in order to solve the problem of website optimization and development of a set of products. Super CMS has a file upload vulnerability that can be exploited by attackers to upload malicious w files and gain server privileges...

Unpatched Fujitsu Wireless Keyboard Bug Allows Keystroke Injection

UPDATE Fujitsu is stopping sales for its popular wireless keyboard after a researcher discovered it is vulnerable to keystroke injection attacks that could allow an adversary to take control of a victim’s system. Researchers with Germany-based SySS reported on Friday that the high-severity...

Local privilege escalation via the Windows I/O Manager: a variant finding collaboration

The Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC investigates all reports of security vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and services to help make our customers and the global online community more secure. We appreciate the excellent vulnerability research reported to us regularly from the...

Local privilege escalation via the Windows I/O Manager: a variant finding collaboration

The Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC investigates all reports of security vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and services to help make our customers and the global online community more secure. We appreciate the excellent vulnerability research reported to us regularly from the...

Call for Papers | Microsoft BlueHat Shanghai 2019

The Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC recently announced our first BlueHat security conference in Shanghai which will take place on May 29-30, 2019. After 15 years of BlueHat events in Redmond, Washington and Israel, we are thrilled to expand to a new location. We work with many talented...

Breaking the Bank: Weakness in Financial AI Applications

Currently, threat actors possess limited access to the technology required to conduct disruptive operations against financial artificial intelligence AI systems and the risk of this targeting type remains low. However, there is a high risk of threat actors leveraging AI as part of disinformation...

Practical advice for earning higher Microsoft bounty awards

This year at the Nullcon International Security Conference I shared practical advice for how security researchers can maximize the impact of their security vulnerability submissions and earn higher bounty awards under the Microsoft Bounty Program. For those who couldn’t be there, I had two core...

Practical advice for earning higher Microsoft bounty awards

This year at the Nullcon International Security Conference I shared practical advice for how security researchers can maximize the impact of their security vulnerability submissions and earn higher bounty awards under the Microsoft Bounty Program. For those who couldn’t be there, I had two core...

Forrester: Ransomware Set to Resurge As Firms Pay Off Attacks

SAN FRANCISCO – Ransomware may be poised to return as a top scourge for companies, as more and more of them pay up after an attack in an effort to minimize the cost of recovery. That’s just one insight gleaned from an interview at RSA Conference 2019 last week with Josh Zelonis, senior analyst at...

Applicants data of 3 elite US colleges hacked for ransom

By Ryan De Souza Recently it was reported that Chinese hackers are aiming to target around 26 leading research academies to steal research about maritime technology, the majority of which happen to be based in the USA. In the same week, three mainstream private colleges have claimed that their...

RSA Conference 2019: The Expanding Automation Platform Attack Surface

SAN FRANCISCO – Automation platforms are increasingly being used to chain multiple IoT devices together to create user-friendly smart applications – but that’s also creating unpredictable attack surfaces that can be hard to manage. A Trend Micro report released at RSA Conference 2019 warns that...