November 2018 Security Update Release

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide...

The Making of the Top 100 Researcher List

At Black Hat USA each year, we unveil the Top 100 Security Researcher list to reflect the amazing engagement we get from the community. During this period, we had several thousand researchers engage with the Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC. We appreciate all the partnership and coordinati...

From arcades to Azure: Felix’s security research journey

When you talk with Felix, you quickly get the sense that he has always been propelled by curiosity and by a need for something that truly challenges him. Today, he is a successful independent security researcher who uncovers vulnerabilities across Microsoft cloud services. However, his path into...

BlueHat 2023 Call for Papers is Now Open!

For nearly 20 years, BlueHat has been where the security research community, and Microsoft security professionals come together as peers, to share, debate, challenge, learn, and exchange ideas in the interest of creating a safer and more secure world for all. We are extremely excited to announce...

Mitigation for Azure Storage SDK Client-Side Encryption Padding Oracle Vulnerability

Summary: Google informed Microsoft under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure CVD of a padding oracle vulnerability that may affect customers using Azure Storage SDK for Python, .NET, Java client-side encryption CVE-2022-30187. To mitigate this vulnerability, we released a new General Availabilit...

New Nobelium activity

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center is tracking new activity from the NOBELIUM threat actor. Our investigation into the methods and tactics being used continues, but we have seen password spray and brute-force attacks and want to share some details to help our customers and communities prote...

Solorigate Resource Center – updated February 5, 2021

Alongside our industry partners and the security community, Microsoft continues to investigate the extent of the recent nation-state attack on SolarWinds. Our goal is to provide the latest threat intelligence, Indicators of Compromise IOCs, and guidance across our products and solutions to help t...

Customer Guidance on Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks

Note: we are updating as the investigation continues. Revision history listed at the bottom. This post contains technical details about the methods of the actor we believe was involved in Recent Nation-State Cyber Attacks, with the goal to enable the broader security community to hunt for activit...

Using Rust in Windows

This Saturday 9th of November, there will be a keynote from Microsoft engineers Ryan Levick and Sebastian Fernandez at RustFest Barcelona. They will be talking about why Microsoft is exploring Rust adoption, some of the challenges we’ve faced in this process, and the future of Rust adoption in...

Azure Security Lab: a new space for Azure research and collaboration

Azure is exceptionally secure. To help keep it that way, we are doubling the top bounty reward for Azure vulnerabilities to $40,000. But we aren’t stopping there. To make it easier for security researchers to confidently and aggressively test Azure, we are inviting a select group of talented...

April 2018 security update release

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...

Service Fabric Privilege Escalation from Containerized Workloads on Linux

Under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure CVD, cloud-security vendor Palo Alto Networks informed Microsoft of an issue affecting Service Fabric SF Linux clusters CVE-2022-30137. The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control...

Microsoft’s Response to CVE-2022-22965 Spring Framework

Summary Summary Microsoft used the Spring Framework RCE, Early Announcement to inform analysis of the remote code execution vulnerability, CVE-2022-22965, disclosed on 31 Mar 2022. We have not to date noted any impact to the security of our enterprise services and have not experienced any degrade...

October 2019 security updates are available!

We have released the October security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide. As a reminder,...

Toward greater transparency: Unveiling Cloud Service CVEs

Welcome to the second installment in our series on transparency at the Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC. In this ongoing discussion, we discuss our commitment to provide comprehensive vulnerability information to our customers. At MSRC, our mission is to protect our customers, communities,...

Coordinated disclosure of vulnerability in Azure Container Instances Service

Microsoft recently mitigated a vulnerability reported by a security researcher in the Azure Container Instances ACI. Our investigation surfaced no unauthorized access to customer data. Out of an abundance of caution we notified customers with containers running on the same clusters as the...

A Ride on the Wild Side with Hacking Heavyweight Sick Codes

Beverage of Choice: Krating Daeng Thai Red Bull Industry Influencer he Admires: Casey John Ellis What did you want to be when you grew up? A physician and nearly did Hobbies Present & Past: Motorcycling & Australian Football Bucket List: Continuing to discover new software Fun Fact: He currently...

Vulnerability mitigated in the third-party Data Connector used in Azure Synapse pipelines and Azure Data Factory (CVE-2022-29972)

Summary Summary Microsoft recently mitigated a vulnerability in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse pipelines. The vulnerability was specific to the third-party Open Database Connectivity ODBC driver used to connect to Amazon Redshift in Azure Synapse pipelines and Azure Data Factory Integration...

One-Click Microsoft Exchange On-Premises Mitigation Tool – March 2021

We have been actively working with customers through our customer support teams, third-party hosters, and partner network to help them secure their environments and respond to associated threats from the recent Exchange Server on-premises attacks. Based on these engagements we realized that there...

New and Improved Report Abuse Portal and API!

The Report Abuse CERT Portal and Report Abuse API have played a significant role in MSRC’s response to suspected cyberattacks, privacy issues, and abuse originating from Microsoft Online Services. With the contributions from our wonderful community of reporters, we continue to gain insightful...

BlueHat Seattle videos are online!

Were you unable to attend BlueHat Seattle, or wanted to see a session again? We have good news. If you have been waiting for the videos from BlueHat Seattle last month, the wait is over. All videos which the presenter authorized to be recorded are now online and available to anyone. We are also...

A Reminder to Update Your Systems to Prevent a Worm

On May 14, Microsoft released fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that affects some older versions of Windows. In our previous blog post on this topic we warned that the vulnerability is...

Inside MSRC: Sharing Our Story & Customer Tips

For the last 20 years, the Microsoft Security Response Center has been an integral part of Microsoft’s commitment to customer security. We are often called on to talk about the work we do and how customers can apply the lessons we have learned over that period to better their security posture...

Prevent a worm by updating Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-0708)

Today Microsoft released fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that affects some older versions of Windows. The Remote Desktop Protocol RDP itself is not vulnerable. This vulnerability is...

More Details About CVE-2014-4073 Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

Today Microsoft shipped MS14-057 to the .NET Framework in order to resolve an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in the ClickOnce deployment service. While this update fixes this service, developers using Managed Distributed Component Object Model a .NET wrapped around DCOM need to take immedia...

Congratulations to the MSRC 2025 Most Valuable Security Researchers!

The Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program offers public thanks and recognition to security researchers who help protect our customers through discovering and sharing security vulnerabilities under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. Today, we are excited to recognize this year’s Most Valuabl...

Improved Guidance for Azure Network Service Tags

Summary Microsoft Security Response Center MSRC was notified in January 2024 by our industry partner, Tenable Inc., about the potential for cross-tenant access to web resources using the service tags feature. Microsoft acknowledged that Tenable provided a valuable contribution to the Azure...

Service Fabric Privilege Escalation from Containerized Workloads on Linux

Under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure CVD, cloud-security vendor Palo Alto Networks informed Microsoft of an issue affecting Service Fabric SF Linux clusters CVE-2022-30137. The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control...

Microsoft Internal Solorigate Investigation – Final Update

We believe the Solorigate incident is an opportunity to work with the community, to share information, strengthen defenses and respond to attacks. We have now completed our internal investigation into the activity of the actor and want to share our findings, which confirm that we found no evidenc...

New and improved Security Update Guide!

We’re excited to announce a significant update to the Security Update Guide, our one-stop site for information about all security updates provided by Microsoft. This new version will provide a more intuitive user experience to help protect our customers regardless of what Microsoft products or...

November 2019 security updates are available!

We have released the November security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide. As a reminder,...

Attacking the VM Worker Process

In the past year we invested a lot of time making Hyper-V research more accessible to everyone. Our first blog post, “First Steps in Hyper-V Research”, describes the tools and setup for debugging the hypervisor and examines the interesting attack surfaces of the virtualization stack components. W...

Scalable infrastructure for investigations and incident response

Traditional computer forensics and cyber investigations are as relevant in the cloud as they are in on-premise environments, but the methods in which to access and perform such investigations differ. This post will describe some of the challenges of bringing on-premises forensics techniques to th...

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...

Additional information about CVE-2014-6324

Today Microsoft released update MS14-068 to address CVE-2014-6324, a Windows Kerberos implementation elevation of privilege vulnerability that is being exploited in-the-wild in limited, targeted attacks. The goal of this blog post is to provide additional information about the vulnerability, upda...

MSRC Security Researcher Recognition: 2021

Wondering how to get into the 2021 MSRC Most Valuable Security Researcher list and get recognized during the Black Hat USA this August? Read on to learn more about the different paths you can take to get into the top researcher tiers. The MSRC Most Valuable Security Researcher MVR and MSRC...

Top MSRC 2020 Q4 Security Researchers – Congratulations!

We’re excited to announce the top contributing researchers for the 2020 Fourth Quarter Q4! Congratulations to all of the researchers who made this quarter’s leaderboard and a huge thank you to everyone who continues to help secure our customers and the ecosystem. The top three researchers of the...

Attacks exploiting Netlogon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472)

Microsoft has received a small number of reports from customers and others about continued activity exploiting a vulnerability affecting the Netlogon protocol CVE-2020-1472 which was previously addressed in security updates starting on August 11, 2020. If the original guidance is not applied, the...

April 2019 Security Update Release

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide. Tags Security Advisory Securi...

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...

Evolving our approach to coordinated security research: In scope by default

Today at Black Hat Europe, I raised our commitment to customer security through our partnerships with the security research community...

Congratulations to the Top MSRC 2023 Q4 Security Researchers!

Congratulations to all the researchers recognized in this quarter’s Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program leaderboard! Thank you to everyone for your hard work and continued partnership to secure customers. The top three researchers of the 2023 Q4 Security Researcher Leaderboard are Yuki Chen,...

Point and Print Default Behavior Change

Our investigation into several vulnerabilities collectively referred to as “PrintNightmare” has determined that the default behavior of Point and Print does not provide customers with the level of security required to protect against potential attacks. Today, we are addressing this risk by changi...

April 2021 Update Tuesday packages now available

Today is Update Tuesday – our commitment to provide a predictable monthly schedule to release updates and provide the latest protection to our customers. Update Tuesday is a monthly cycle when Microsoft releases patches for vulnerabilities that we have found proactively or that have been disclose...

Security Analysis of CHERI ISA

Is it possible to get to a state where memory safety issues would be deterministically mitigated? Our quest to mitigate memory corruption vulnerabilities led us to examine CHERI Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions, which provides memory protection features against many exploited...

A Reminder to Update Your Systems to Prevent a Worm

On May 14, Microsoft released fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that affects some older versions of Windows. In our previous blog post on this topic we warned that the vulnerability is...

Congratulations to the top MSRC 2026 Q2 security researchers!

Congratulations to the researchers recognized in the MSRC 2026 Q2 Security Researcher Leaderboard. This quarter marks the final quarterly points-based leaderboard as we transition to our updated researcher recognition program. We are grateful for the contributions of the security research communi...

March 2019 Security Update Release

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide...

July 2018 Security Update Release

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide...

BlueHat India Call for Papers is Now Open!

You asked for it and it’s finally here! The inaugural BlueHat India conference will be held May 16-17th, 2024, in Hyderabad, India! This intimate conference will bring together a unique blend of security researchers and responders, who come together as peers to exchange ideas, experiences, and...