MSRC Ecosystem Strategy Team

Guten Morgen! Joe Hemmerlein hier vom Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). I just returned from Germany earlier this month, where I spent some time mingling with security researchers. It's customary that we share a bit of our experience at security conferences right here, on the EcoStrat blog - and this is my first posting.

Outside temperatures were around the freezing point in Berlin during the 26^th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3), which is organized by the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and considered to be the European Hacker Con.

It’s only natural that physical borders start to blur when hackers from all over the world come together to participate in such a unique happening – 4 days and nights between Christmas and New Year – to work on projects together, give and attend talks, and have fun while suffering from collective deprivation of sleep. There is strong consensus that the latter is fought best through the influence of Club-Mate (dubbed "hacker soda" by some) which is a carbonated Yerba maté-based drink brewed in Germany. Club-Mate is the prime ingredient in the venue’s most favorite cocktail, Tschunk. This year’s conference motto, "Here Be Dragons", is a reference to historic seafaring folks who explored the unknown looking for new continents, treasures, and maybe even dragons.

The focus this year was on wireless telephony, net neutrality, the Internet protocol, and some cryptography – certainly relating to areas where Microsoft is active, but without any specific focus on our products. The titles of my personal top-five talks were Using OpenBSC for fuzzing of GSM handsets, cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/f█ckups, Exposing Crypto Bugs through reverse engineering, WikiLeaks Release 1.0, and Security Nightmares; the latter of which was presented in German and simultaneously interpreted for non-German-speaking folks! Sessions could also be watched via a stream or listened to via the internal telephony system thanks to the 26C3 Phone Operation Center.

The recipe of communication seasoned with chaos to taste, and baked into the form of a Congress, again resulted in a unique blend of talks in the categories of society, hacking, making, science, culture and community. These categories merely give you an abstract idea of how diverse the field of hacking can be; contrary to common belief, hacking isn’t exclusively about breaking, it’s more about approaching the world in a curiously creative manner and a holistic view of how stuff works (or fails). Loads of hackers and häcksen, the latter being a German pun on the words hacker and hexe (which is German for witch), were just waiting to demonstrate and work on projects together, and discuss matters of – well - hacking. That tesla coil you built for a science project brings down your ethernet unless you use a specific packet size? How to make a tesla coil sing the Ghostbusters theme? Responsible disclosure vs. full disclosure? Different designs and materials for RepRap 3D printer extruder nozzles you’ve been experimenting with? Dismantling conspiracy theories over a couple of beers? All it takes is an open mind, some level of determination and creativity, and you’ll leave the con not only having made new friends, but also with many new ideas on what to do until the next con. Not only did I spend time attending talks or catching up with fellow hackers on the progress of projects, there was also plenty of quality time in talking shop with researchers, colleagues and other experts on the status quo and recent developments in security response.

Unfortunately, tickets sold out within a mere 12 hours. For those who didn’t get tickets or couldn’t make it to Berlin in the first place, Dragons everywhere was an experiment that allowed locations in Berlin or somewhere else on this planet to hook up to the congress network via VPN for remote participation. As most of the talks were recorded and released under a Creative Commons license for everyone to download legally, please excuse me now while I play catch-up! J See you next time!

-Joe Hemmerlein, Security Program Manager

G’day, or should I say howdy, y’all. As the newest member of the Microsoft EcoStrat team, I figured I would do a quick self-introduction before getting down to work. I am a Senior Security Strategist with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) based in Redmond. Prior to my big move to the USA, I was the Operations Manager of AusCERT in Australia (that’s the place that is famous for kangaroos and Tim Tams, to ensure you didn’t think I meant Austria!) My role here at Microsoft varies, but at the very top of my list is ensuring that Microsoft strengthens its relationship with the global community of national and government Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs).

It was in that capacity that I was privileged recently to attend the GovCERT.NL symposium, hosted by the Dutch Government CERT in the city of Rotterdam. What an event! The Dutch government CERT, GovCERT.NL, put on a truly world-class event. I cannot recall ever having been to an event so well-polished and professionally presented. The program was rich, varied, and robust, with a number of international and domestic speakers. But for me, the highlight was the interaction in the CERT community.

Although the symposium is primarily focused on meeting the needs of GovCERT.NL’s constituents, the attendance from much of the international CERT community makes the event all that much more dynamic. The national CERT community is a thriving and robust effort, allowing teams across national borders to work together and deliver collective results to provide more protection to the ecosystem. If you are in government, law enforcement, or industry and you don’t know your national CERT, you don’t know what you are missing! I was fortunate enough to meet with quite a number of national CERTs during this event from the European region and as far afield as Asia. This was most useful, as the MSRC is looking to engage more strongly with the community of national CERTs. In addition, Mike Reavey, Director of the MSRC, was also able to attend, and not only sat on a panel, but also spent time talking in depth with several CERTs about the issues facing the CERT community as well as how to develop better working relationships. It is this open dialogue and the coalescence of like-minded individuals that tends to be a hallmark of CERT-based events. In addition to formal meetings on the days before and after the symposium, it was clear that the global CERT representatives present were spending quality time sharing techniques, discussing common strategies, and building stronger interpersonal relationships. It is still the case that interpersonal relationships are the life-blood of this community, but there have also been some strong moves towards establishing organizational-level relationships with increasing bilateral and multilateral formal relations. I am keen to watch this grow, and will assist where I can.

I consider these groupings of CERTs to be invaluable. We have all heard that the Internet is a global thing, with no concept of borders or jurisdiction. While this may be the case, this also implies that there is no one responsible for looking after the problems on the Internet. I see the Internet as a global ecosystem, and in any ecosystem you need those who keep order. That is where I see the role for the National CERTs, tackling the problems of the Internet on a nation-by-nation basis. It is something that every country can do, take responsibility for their “own patch"; it is the Internet version of “think globally, act locally”. It is important also to realize that Internet security is not a problem that can be fixed by law enforcement, or any other group, alone. CERTs perform an important role, not only providing advice and guidance, but also assisting with coordination and remediation. A CERT from one country knows that they can reach out to a trusted partner in another country to resolve an issue and that means the CERT only needs to know their own constituents and their fellow CERTs. In the absence of such a network, every CERT would need to be able to communicate with every organization, and potentially every individual, to resolve issues.

For a great practical example of a CERT working locally to assist in protecting the global ecosystem, I would recommend that you look at the work being done by CERT-FI and their Autoreporter service. This service is a great example of a CERT, working with feeds from the globally community, taking responsibility for their constituency and working to remediate the threat within their own borders. This is the sort of work I feel all CERTs globally should be looking to when considering how to be an effective and contributing member in the global security community. This sort of activity has helped the Finnish IP space to become one of the “cleanest” in the world, as called out in the recent Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 7. Great work CERT-FI!

I hope to see those national CERTs, who are not already a part of Microsoft Security Cooperation Program for CERTs (SCPcert), look at joining this initiative, as a first step in building a deeper and more substantive operational relationship with Microsoft. It is from the bedrock of this program that I hope to find new and innovative ways to assist the CERT community in the shared responsibility of protecting the ecosystem.

In conclusion, the GovCERT.NL event was great to attend. It gave me a quick refresher on just how much potential there is within the CERT community globally to work together, and with industry, to increase the level of ecosystem-wide security. I am looking forward to my part in working with and helping foster this important community

-Karl Hanmore, Senior Security Strategist

*Postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

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Celene here from the MSRC Ecosystem Strategy Team. BlueHat v9: Through The Looking Glass ended just over a month ago and the success of the con lives on due to the outstanding training and networking between Microsoft employees, external speakers, and guests. I'm happy to say that the speaker video interviews and selected recorded presentations are now live on the BlueHat TechNet Page. As promised, we have posted talks from every track block. The samples available are from the e-crime, cloud, mobile and fuzzing content blocks.

As you probably know by now, BlueHat is primarily about educating our own Microsoft population so we can better understand how to build more secure products. The more we know about the security ecosystem, the more we at Microsoft can truly comprehend and assess our security reality. Our secondary goals are to build bridges and bring transparency to the security community to facilitate positive information exchanges.

One way we measure how well are meeting our goals is through surveying our attendees. Here are some of the survey highlights from BlueHat v9 that I want to share with you.

Survey Results for BlueHat General Sessions:

• 92% of attendee respondents believed the overall quality of the event (speakers, venue, logistics, etc.) was good or excellent
• 92% of attendee respondents felt attending was a good use of their time
• 74% of attendee respondents say they will be able to apply knowledge they learned at the BlueHat general sessions to make their product(s) more secure

W00t! Strong numbers like those make it all worth it, I tell you! Big thanks to all our speakers and now new members of the BlueHat network, the BlueHat content review team, and Dana Hehl for making everything look so easy.

Mark your calendars! The next BlueHat is October 14-15, 2010. See you all there.

-Celene Temkin

BlueHat Project Manager

*Postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

Hi! It's been a while since I've had a chance to blog about all the things we have been doing here. As travelling around to various security events is a big part of our mantra, I’ve been to Tokyo Japan for PacSec and Seoul, South Korea for POC 2009. Both were great conferences and had great security talks.

PacSec had a lot of the Japanese security scene in attendance (the local powerhouses are pretty sharp and savvy) along with international researchers and past BlueHat speakers, Charlie Miller and Alex Stamos. Take a minute to check out archived presentations from our own Tony Lee introducing the SIRv7 and Jason Shirk discussing fuzzing strategies. But the biggest interest concerned mobile code threats such as malware and how the perimeter defenses are fading away as a viable protection. This seems to be a hot topic everywhere, so hot that the just wrapped-up BlueHat v9 con had an entire track dedicated to mobile security, and in June 2010, at the annual FIRST Conference, how the perimeter defenses are fading away will be the theme for the whole conference.

It’s a cyclic state when it comes to the effectiveness of protections. I remember back in the 80s and 90s when the firewall was going to fix it all. But like everything in life, things evolve and the firewall became a part of a complex mesh of other technologies created to evolve with the threats.

This cyclic and evolving process is something we know a lot about here in Microsoft. The continued security evolution built the MSRC process and the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). This is how we had to react to threats.

Visiting POC 2009 and PacSec, I got more of a sense of how people outside Microsoft evolve and react; most created either more complex processes or bought more technologies. As I was sitting at POC 2009 watching the presentations, I saw the same theme here as well. It seems that with the evolution of threats, security people everywhere are throwing up more complex processes and technologies. But what happens when the complexity we have created outstrips the problem? I can see that we are always going to have the technological challenges of new threats.

For instance, Conficker, a new threat that helped every security professional evolve due to the complex nature of the threat. However, something else happened with Conficker that really turned on a light in my head. Conficker took advantage of old threats and long-standing security best practices. The fact that Conficker used these old threats and was still widely successful in exploiting our complex processes and technologies is interesting.

I couldn't help asking myself this question, could it be that due to our complexity that we have failed to take into account past experiences? I don’t think so. I think what we may have done is forgotten one or two primary focus security factors. Those factors are “people” and “process”. People management for security is a key tenet of any type of security plan. This fact has been proven everywhere and in every topic including computer security.

If your plan does not take into account an understanding of the human factor and what it means to your security process, you are missing an important point. Understanding the “people” factor will help you in the next important part of the security plan, which is the process part.

Sitting down at PacSec and POC 2009, I see that we have a firm grip on the technological-advancement front. The presentations at both conferences were excellent technically and on the cusp of new developments. But I still believe that a more focused approach on the “people” factor of computer security would do more to enhance the security than technology advancements will.

Here at Microsoft we are looking in that direction as we look at the technological enhancements coming to the continent of Africa. Here is a place where we will have the chance to stress a focus on the ”people” aspect while building up the processes to take advantage of the new technologies afforded the populace. Hopefully you’ll be seeing more of this model in future posts from me as this new initiative develops. But for now make sure to look at the “people” factor as you create, modify or react to problems in the security landscape. It may surprise you what fresh new perspectives and solutions it gives you.

- -Steve

*Postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

 BlueHat v9 will take place from October 21 to 23 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Last year, we experimented with a day dedicated to attacks and a day dedicated to SDL security mitigations. This year, we will give you the best content out there… we are interweaving talks from internal and external security subject matter experts with themes related to e-crime, mobile security, cloud computing, and fuzzing.

We kick it off with the BlueHat Executive Sessions on October 21 with condensed versions of the presentations delivered in a deeply technical "Cliff Notes" style. October 22 and 23 are filled with BlueHat General Sessions for our Microsoft IT pro and developer population.

As a refresher, this conference is primarily about educating our own Microsoft population so we can better understand how to build more secure products. The more we know about the security ecosystem, the more we at Microsoft can truly comprehend and assess our own security reality.

We were able to record talks and deliver them to the masses on the Web for BlueHat v8 -- we'll continue this momentum and keep the "technical equivalent of those free online courses from MIT" coming for all attendees. You can also count on the usual speaker video podcasts, anecdotes, archives, and new to BlueHat v9, the first BlueHat Training Video examining Office Binary File Formats, content provided by our benevolent counterparts on the MSRC Engineering Team.

As always, I’m incredibly excited to see the amazing security education, partnerships, and networking opportunities that come out of our community-based defense platform. Like Alice going through the looking glass to get to Wonderland, we have to change our perspective to understand the threat landscape. Should Alice want to send a message back to Bob in the real world, it’s up to all of us to keep Eve out of the conversation. ;-)

Here’s a brief overview of the talks and speakers. Full details will be available on the BlueHat web site within the week.

October 22, 2009

Morning Block: Hyper Reality: Who’s Been Painting My Roses Red?

Tumble down the rabbit hole with us as we kick off the BlueHat v9 General Sessions examining e-crime motivation, attacks, and how to navigate through the mounting social engineering aspect of security coverage. We kick off with Jose Nazario taking a deep dive into DDoS attacks and their growing role as an online political weapon in Politically Motivated Denial of Service Attacks. Next up, Adobe’s Peleus Uhley and our own Jesse Collins will scrutinize the great power and responsibility that comes along with those flashy Web applications in RIA Security: Real-World Lessons from Flash and Silverlight. We then wrap up the morning *Cheshire Cat grin* exploring a little flaw by the name of ATL in The Language of Trust: Exploiting Trust Relationships in Active Content, by Ryan Smith, Mark Dowd and David Dewey.

Afternoon Block: Mobile (in)Security: Curiouser and Curiouser

As more people onboard themselves to smart mobile devices our wonderland certainly has gotten curiouser and curiouser. Take a ride with us as Luis Miras and Zane Lackey uncover Attacking SMS and show us how easy it is to be a victim when there is hardly any user interaction needed to fall prey to attack. Next up, our own Josh Lackey will serve some of the teacups of goodness and tell us what is on the horizon with Mobile Security and Software Radio. Charlie Miller will then show us how to stand on our heads and use automated fuzzing on the iPhone and outline the vuln he found as well as how to exploit it in iPhone SMS Hacking with a Touch About Payloads. Last, we will hear from Patrick McCanna of AT&T Security as he gives us an overview of security threats that face mobile operators in Mobile Operator Security: Security Challenges for Global Networks for Pocket-sized Devices.

October 23, 2009

Morning Block: Cloud Services & Virtualization: Up Above the World You Fly, Like a Tea Tray in the Sky…

Kicking off day 2, we find ourselves up in the clouds, quite literally. In Cloudifornication: Indiscriminate Information Intercourse Involving Internet Infrastructure, Chris Hoff of Cisco takes us on a journey where we learn some really scary things happening with the massive convergence of virtualization and cloud computing and their effect on security models and the information they are designed to protect. Our own Mad Hatter, John Walton, will walk us through advantages and challenges within the Microsoft Software-plus-Services model in Get Your Head Out of the Clouds: Security in Software-plus-Services. Flying up even further, Robert Fly takes on a journey highlighting unique aspects of building enterprise-ready cloud services and how to avoid the torrential rainfall of unforeseen problems in Creating Clouds: Avoiding Rain In The Transition From On-Premise To Services. We then wind up the afternoon with past BlueHat speakers Billy Rios and Nitesh Dhanjani engaging us in new discussions on the security implications and magic mushrooms that are likely to effect the cloud platforms and their clients in the near future in Sharing the Cloud with Your Enemy.

Afternoon Block: Fuzzing Tools & Mitigations: Chasing the White Rabbit

As we end our adventure through the looking glass, our Google friends Tavis Ormandy and Neel Mehta will paint a picture on how their technique of sub-instruction profiling uncovered multiple vulnerabilities in Windows. Next up, we get to take a peek Under the Kimono of Office Security Engineering with our own Tom Gallagher and Dave Conger as they show us a framework built by the Office team to efficiently fuzz any file format parser. The final session before hearing from our guests in the security community amongst the ill-fated gong of our lighting talks will be Chris Webers’ Character Transformations: Finding Hidden Vulnerabilities. This talk will cover ways which latent character and string handling can transform clever inputs into malicious outputs in cross-site scripting.

We will continue to update the BlueHat blog and the TechNet site to keep you current on the happenings during and around the conference. See you in Wonderland!

-Celene

*Postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.*

When complex security issues that affect multiple vendors arise, calling them “challenging” is an understatement. We created the Microsoft Vulnerability Research Program (MSVR) to meet those challenges, learn from those experiences and strengthen the ties of our community of defenders across the industry in the process. As the state of software security matures beyond straightforward issues such as buffer overflows and elevation of privilege, we are working diligently towards a new level of cross-industry collaboration on a scale never seen before. We must do so in order to provide our mutual customers with the best possible experience on our platform.

The recent Active Template Library (ATL) issue required us to find a new and more collaborative manner to respond to the developing threats as more information about the vulnerability details became public. MSVR was at the heart of the response and coordination, along with MSRC, to find a solution. As MSRC focused on what it does regularly, which is driving change within Microsoft, MSVR kicked into high gear to coordinate and assist as many third-party affected vendors as possible to help resolve an industry-wide issue.

Several firsts and questions had to be met head-on by our relatively young MSVR program now celebrating its first birthday.

· How do we maintain and respect the overarching tenets of Responsible Disclosure while sharing the issue outside of Microsoft?

· How do we communicate openly and directly with multiple impacted parties while not putting customers at risk by a potential broad disclosure prior to the availability of mitigation?

· How do we translate an issue that we came to understand very well to third parties that may not have the same technical history or security response methodologies and practices that we do?

· Can we coordinate across the industry so that everyone is moving to the same goal of addressing the problem, despite differing development practices and engineering requirement timelines?

The talented security researchers that reported the issue to Microsoft had done so in a responsible manner with the goal of improving the ecosystem and helping us protect our customers. At the same time, it became clear to us that this was an industry-wide problem and that the best way to secure the ecosystem was to notify affected vendors while engineering efforts were underway here in Redmond. Microsoft is a supporter of Responsible Disclosure, which aims to allow affected vendors to understand and try to resolve their respective issues before discussing the details of the issue publicly. In this instance, MSVR’s actions demonstrated a variety of responsible disclosure recently dubbed "partial disclosure," when we alerted third-party vendors who we believed had controls compiled with our vulnerable ATL headers. In the past year of MSVR operations, we have acted in the Responsible Disclosure roles of Finder and Coordinator. The ATL issue required us to act in both of those roles, plus in the role of affected Vendor.

While we knew we had to disclose technical details to a broad group, the clock was also ticking as we began to see more and more details about this issue being discussed and discovered in the security community. The original security researchers that reported the issue to us worked with us diligently and patiently to continue acting responsibly with their understanding of the problem, while we began developing a process and technical tools to analyze our controls and look for a solution. At the same time, we began the process of identifying and analyzing the controls that are most commonly deployed but were developed by other vendors. It is at this point we felt that we had a viable way to individually engage as many of these affected vendors as possible to discuss the impact of the issue as it relates to their potentially vulnerable controls.

Due to their potential scope, library-related vulnerabilities can often stir uncertainty and concern in the industry, so we focused our efforts to understand the true depth and breadth of the impact. Our analysis indicated that the vast majority of controls that would impact our users could be addressed by a few key vendors in the ecosystem. With this in mind, MSVR reached out to vendors who had the broadest footprint in the ecosystem that we believed were affected by the issue. We also felt confident that the defense-in-depth engineering solutions being worked on here at Microsoft would help provide a safeguard against attacks and allow other vendors more time to modify and recompile their own controls.

Overall, our goals and objectives were straightforward, if not exactly effortless, and required us to also leverage many of the key lessons learned by the MSRC over the years. After we distilled the actions and goals down to their most elemental levels, it became clear we had to move quickly on several fronts, including:

· Coming up with our own defense-in-depth solution to help protect customers and mitigate the threat.

· Taking steps to identify quickly the affected third-party vendors who we thought had the broadest impact on our platform.

· Finding the right security contacts at the vendors who met those criteria.

· Packaging and disseminating the vulnerability information to them securely.

Our goals in doing so were to:

· Alert as many of the community of vendors who have affected controls as possible that there was an issue with ATL.

· Provide the third-party vendors with technical details necessary to perform the broad analysis of all of their controls to look for the vulnerability in their products.

· Support the third-party vendors in their analysis, answering their questions, and clarifying the issue when necessary.

· Coordinate with the major affected third parties in both the release of the updates, as well as with guidance for our mutual customers.

We learned a lot during this process. After all, evolution requires change in the way we think and in the way we act, which leads to growth. We will incorporate these lessons into MSVR processes moving forward. We have formed stronger relationships across organizations that MSVR has worked with on other issues in the past, and we have forged many new bonds with security teams across company boundaries. Overall, we are very pleased with the positive industry response, and we salute our counterparts in the security organizations of all the third-party vendors we have worked with during this historic collaboration, including but not limited to Adobe and Sun. We are also incredibly thankful and appreciative of Ryan Smith and David Dewey, the original security researchers that reported the issue to us responsibly, as it was a multidimensional challenge that required significant patience and understanding on their part as we determined how to best address the problem.

As we move forward toward the next challenges on the security horizon, we can anticipate deeper integration among the community of defenders, whether they work for Microsoft or a third-party vendor, whether they are security researchers or are members of a CERT – we can expect more collaboration. After all, progress towards securing our platform, as has been made with our own SDL, will naturally lead to attacks being more complex, more dependent on how applications interact with each other and with the underlying operating system, and therefore will require us all to look past our company logos and focus on that threat horizon.

I’m Adrian Stone, who ran the ATL coordination and is the new driver of the MSVR program since July 1, and I’m Katie Moussouris, founder of the MSVR program, and together with the security community, we look forward to advancing community-based defense and helping to usher in this new age of collaborative security for the good of all our customers.

OMG it’s great to be back in Vegas again – the shows, the shopping, the nightlife, and let’s not forget the talks at Black Hat, the old and new friends, the excitement and the drama. I can hardly wait to see what develops this year!

Last year at Black Hat, the Microsoft Security Response Center announced three new programs – Microsoft Active Protections Programs (MAPP), Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR), and Microsoft Exploitability Index. I was honestly a bit nervous about how the programs would be received. Would the community ridicule them (and us)? Were the programs as solid as we thought they were? Would they stand the test of time? And most importantly, would they help advance community-based defense?

It’s a year later and I’m happy to report that the programs were not only well received, but have proven to be effective, accurate, and continue to deliver results. MAPP is changing the balance between attacker and defender, MSVR is raising the security of the overall ecosystem, and the Exploitability Index continues to provide customers with accurate, easy to understand, and actionable guidance. Today, MSRC published a report card – “Building a Safer, More Trusted Internet through Information Sharing” – that both summarizes these results and provides specifics around goals achieved. Read all about it here.

Today at Black Hat, MSRC also released a new set of tools and guidance aimed at continuing to advance community-based defense and simplify customers’ management of the risk environment.

First up, the Microsoft Security Update Guide - a one stop shop of information on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, including what information we release, best practices, and a framework to help make the complex patch management landscape more clear. It’s available for free download here.

On the tooling front, the MSRC Engineering team (owners of and contributors to the SRD blog) released the Microsoft Office Visualization Tool. Available for free download here, the new tool lowers the barrier to understanding the Office binary file format by allowing IT professionals, security researchers, and malware protection vendors to deconstruct .doc-, .xls- and .ppt-based targeted attacks.

Lastly, we’re pleased to point to the latest updates from Project Quant, a cost model program for patch management response collaboratively lead by Rich Mogulll (Securosis) and Jeff Jones (Microsoft). With the new information released today – Project Quant Report 1.0, Model Spreadsheet 1.0, and the Survey Report – the community is better able to improve their update practices by addressing many of the challenges organizations face optimizing their systems and maintaining security while striving to keeping costs down.

Black Hat is an exciting time and I’m thrilled to showcase the impact and continued progress of MSRC – and even more so to demonstrate how Trustworthy Computing continues to evolve in response to the changes in the threat landscape, and truly helps protects customers through community-based defense and collaboration.

See you at Caesars!

Andrew

Hey!

It’s that time of year again for all of us to pack up and head out to the desert to reconnect, discuss, and plan for the future, or at least what we think will be the future of security. It’s hard to predict what the next year will bring as the security landscape is ever-changing. This is probably why most of us “grey beards” in the security industry mark the Black Hat/Defcon conferences as the de facto year in review/preview of the next year for the state of security. These conferences have defined a lot of security strategies for a number of people for years. But I digressJ; I started to talk about the year-end review for the security landscape.

Looking back over the year, I am pleased to see that we have executed nicely on a couple of strategies we put into place to change the security landscape. The ones I am talking about are the three programs listed below that we launched last year around this time.

• Exploitability Index
• Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP)
• Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR)

I am going to talk about the first two programs as I have been working on both of them for a bit. MSVR has been worked by my colleague Adrian who will be blogging on MSVR in the near future. He will update you about all the exciting things they have been doing over there.

So let’s begin. I want to talk to you first about the Exploitability Index. Like I said, the one-year anniversary is right around the corner and we have been getting a lot of positive feedback from customers on this new program. Looking back, I am happy to see that out of the 140 ratings we provided so far that we only had to revise one rating. The one rating we did change went from a high severity to a lower one (1 to 3).

Let me give some of our reasons for this. We are extremely cautious when we rate things and when in doubt, will tend to go with the higher rating. We want to make sure that those who are using our ratings are protected against exploitation. This is kind of like putting a deadbolt lock on your door even though you live right next to the police station – I would rather be safe than sorry. However, we are always looking for ways to improve our ratings, and we tend to seek out the critical areas where we can or need to improve.

There is no better place, in our mind, to get good feedback than from the security ecosystem. So we were extremely happy when iDefense took up the charge to review our Exploitability Index ratings for the first 120 days. I am sure you are thinking, "Is 120 days really enough time?" Well, it definitely gave a decent snapshot into how the program is progressing. I think it’s also a good timeframe for catching early process deficiencies and other issues. So let me highlight a few things that were discovered during the iDefense review.

Overall assessment: iDefense concluded that the Microsoft Exploitability Index was a step in the right direction. They felt that the Index provides clear value to customers in providing more risk mitigation information. iDefense also felt that it helps system administrators with the prioritization of their system-updating efforts, because with the Index, they can use another piece of information to help set their update schedule.

Out of the fifty-seven vulnerabilities reviewed by iDefense, they considered that only fourteen should have been rated differently. This is a ~75% percent similarity between their analyses and our own.

As with all early efforts, they did find some areas where they had suggestions for improvement. One area is with the rating differences mentioned above. We will be reviewing the reasons for the differences and will be looking at our present process to take their suggestions into account. Check out the full report here.

Now let’s talk about the Microsoft Active Protections Program, or as we call it in the hallways of building 27, “MAPP”. The MAPP program goals were to find a way to shorten the attack window for consumers. We wanted to be able provide enough “just in time” technical information on the vulnerabilities that we were updating every month to help defenders provide software protections faster. It didn’t make sense in our eyes to have verified defenders in the same boat as malicious attackers trying to understand and reverse-engineer our updates to build defenses for our mutual customers.

I am glad to say that we have exceeded our goal. In the program to date, we have 47 companies from around the world, with new partners added in Central and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, South East Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This partner network global reach represents software protections that cover a range from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of consumers. That is nothing to sneeze at! J It doesn’t stop there; we will continue to add more partners to ensure that we arm the defenders with information they need to protect you, our mutual customers. We have some more proof points on how we are shrinking that attack window, but don’t take my word for it, check out the testimonials from the MAPP members themselves in the year-end progress report from MSRC here.

Well, that’s it. Don’t forget to check out the iDefense paper located here and the MAPP paper here. And keep an eye on www.microsoft.com/twc/blogs for more Black Hat blogs from the front lines.

Til next time….

Steve

 

Take a gander as Billy Rios, Security Engineer, Business Online Services, and Bryan Sullivan, Senior Security Program Manager, Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), discuss their experiences with the security community both inside and outside of Microsoft.

 

If you haven’t already, take a look at the previous video posts for additional perspectives from other key security community members.  All videos will be available on http://edge.technet.com/ after Black Hat.

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As mentioned in Sarah’s Black Hat post, we’re profiling some of our own internal security members and sharing their perspectives around Microsoft’s engagement in the security community.  Maarten Van Horenbeeck, Security Program Manager, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) and Katie Moussouris, Senior Security Strategist, Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), answer the following two questions:

How did we become involved in security at Microsoft?

What changes have we seen at Microsoft security over the years?

 

Keep an eye out for more security personalities sharing their perspectives tomorrow and be sure to visit www.microsoft.com/twc/blogs for additional posts by Katie, Maarten and other TwC Security folks on the ground at Black Hat!

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This week our team is preparing to travel to Black Hat USA in Las Vegas Nevada, a hotspot (literally and figuratively), and one of the largest gatherings of security professionals in the world. Black Hat brings together diverse security communities to discuss, debate, deploy, and disseminate security information. It is a week of breaking bread with our friends and rivals, learning from others around the world and bridging the roles of researcher and vendor to raise our security awareness.

Within Microsoft, we have a community of security defenders.

Our internal community also discusses, debates, deploys, and disseminates security information. We don’t always agree; our perspectives and backgrounds are as diverse as the world we live in. We strive to understand and mitigate flaws in our own products and platforms, and also responsibly research vulnerabilities in third-party software most commonly used by Windows customers. We focus on many different areas, working on not only improving the security of Windows, but of the entire Windows ecosystem.

For me, security is more than a mindset or an end state, it is a mission. Security is a theme that has the power to unite organizations and individuals across teams across geographic and company boundaries. Within this mission, I, along with our internal community, strive to help ‘secure our planet’ by building bridges and creating opportunities for technical information exchange.

As we look to meeting with our security comrades from around the world in Vegas, we thought it would be interesting to highlight the perspectives and backgrounds of individuals within our internal security community of defenders and present them in short videos to be rolled out over the next week. 

The Microsoft security community folks profiled answered two questions:

How did we become involved in security at Microsoft?

What changes have we seen at Microsoft security over the years?

As our challenges have evolved and become a great deal more complex, our collective communities must also rise to the occasion, evolving our security awareness and response. From our security community to yours, we hope you enjoy learning a little bit more about us as we work to understand more about you all.

And remember, in this digital age, what happens in Vegas doesn’t actually stay in Vegas. ;-)

Stay Secure!
Sarah

P.S.: Check out our new Trustworthy Computing blog aggregator! (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/blogs/default.mspx) This handy aggregator is a one-stop TwC resource for security and privacy blogging news at Microsoft. Add it to your RSS feeds to stay up to date on security updates, privacy, malware response, security science news and more.

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Konnichiwa!

I guess you are wondering why I said hello in Japanese. I have just recently returned from attending the 21^st Forum of Incident Handling and Security Teams (FIRST) annual conference hosted in the awesome city of Kyoto in Japan. The city of Kyoto is beautiful. I was amazed at all the interesting palaces and temples located right in the middle of a modern city. It was truly awesome. What was even more awesome was the 21^st FIRST Annual Conference. You have heard us here at Microsoft talk a lot lately about community-based defense initiatives. These initiatives drive the security ecosystem to work in a coordinated fashion to address security issues. This works best by creating a community that is built on trust and common goals. The common goal here is to build coordinated defense from attacks. FIRST is one such trusted, security-focused community. This is one reason why Microsoft supports their efforts. As a community of incident and security response teams, FIRST provides a trusted network to share information and provide coordination efforts that is all member-driven.

Most members work for larger companies but their efforts in the FIRST organization are at times above and beyond the duties of their jobs. FIRST relies on its member community to do a lot of work since it is a not-for-profit organization. The conferences are no different. This year the Japanese local teams of FIRST had the task of assisting the conference organizers set things up. Let me say they did an excellent job. It was surreal from the banquet to the mixer session; it was, in a word, “exquisite.” I personally loved the entertainment by a troupe of local taiko drummers. Check them out here.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though some of it was. Check out the picture above. As you can see, we got the rare chance to interact with the potential future security community thanks to Ziv Mador, a Microsoft security professional from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) group, who brought his family along to the conference. Thanks to Eyal and Ofer Mador who provided us a wonderful chance to show them how cool security professionals can be.

Back to business. As a member of the Steering Committee (SC), we meet year round. However, we usually conduct most annual business at the conference. That business can range from giving status updates on projects to providing the organization’s financial numbers. We also hold elections for the committee when an SC member’s term is up. This year, we elected two new members to the SC, joining the three current members of the committee.

Speaking of elections, I am glad that Microsoft views our participation in FIRST as a key thing. This is extremely good, as it seems I will be spending a fair bit more time working on the FIRST Steering Committee and Board of Directors. At this annual general meeting (AGM), I was elected to be the Chairman of the Steering Committee and President of the Board of Directors for FIRST. I look forward to stepping into these roles to help steer the organization toward its goals.

The conference tracks presented were great and focused on relevant problems faced by incident handling teams, from network monitoring to malware analysis.

We also conducted meetings of special interest groups (SIG) to cover in-depth problems and issues faced by members in the same interest and focus areas. These sessions are really great because you get to meet like-minded peers who are facing the same problems you face. The Law Enforcement SIG and Network Monitoring SIG were well attended this year.

You have heard Andrew Cushman talk about “Hallway Tracks” as a way to label all connections and conversations taking place outside of the presented tracks. The hallway tracks at the conference were golden. The amount of focused security discussion I had out in the hallway will have me set for a month with action items.

Well, that’s it for now. But before I go I wanted to take the time to introduce a new member to the EcoStrat Team. I want to welcome Karl Hanmore to the team. He comes to us from Auscert with a strong CERT background. He will be with us in Vegas at Black Hat… so see ya there!

-Steve

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Aloha from the Shakacon III, a security conference held each year in lovely Honolulu, Hawaii! Although I’m currently in a different region of the world, talking with a completely different segment of the security ecosystem, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the BlueHat Security Forum EU event recently held in Brussels, Belgium.

Celene’s EcoStrat blog post highlighted the collaborative nature of the event and described the amazing content that was presented to the group of key EU security stakeholders. While to be a part of building a new platform for technical information exchange was a success in itself, we all have different priorities. In order to effect change, we must understand each other and work together, across technologies, organizations, and country boundaries. With the building of better collaboration in this community, we all have taken one more step in helping to secure the planet as a collective.

I’ve mentioned in a previous EcoStrat post that the EcoStrat team strives to build bridges and help folks get over them. The BlueHat Security Forum EU event was an example of bridge-building in action. It was rewarding to introduce representatives from governments, industry, and enterprises, as well as individual participants to each other. Prior to the BlueHat Security Forum, this particularly diverse group had never been in the same room discussing current security threat landscapes, understanding together the realities of securing critical national infrastructures and corporate networks alike.

With such a diverse collection of attendees, participants naturally had a wide-range of security priorities. Concerns ranged from targeted attacks to ID theft, defending Web applications and supply chains, developing and deploying secure coding practices to policy development, political concerns within and outside of the EU, and the list goes on.

Certainly the message that there is no one magic solution to security was delivered. There is still so much work to be done. It will take defense-in-depth, secure coding, securing third-party applications and proprietary applications; it will take technology and people. We all understand that security can be likened to an arms race; every innovation we make in security is met by a very sophisticated collective of global malicious actors. We must be vigilant together; we must work together.

Mahalo for reading and here’s to another step towards achieving community-based defense.

Sarah

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Hey folks! I know this is typically the time of year when birds are chirping, the rain is supposed to be letting up, and those of you in the BlueHat network who are normally invited to attend the Spring BlueHat conference are asking yourselves, "Why did MSRC start doing the con only once a year?" The answer, of course, is pretty simple and complicated at the same time. Today marks the beginning of the next evolution of the BlueHat Security Briefings, with the launch of the BlueHat Security Forum taking place at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in Brussels, Belgium.

Following the success of the BlueHat Security Briefings, entering its 9^th iteration this October 22-23 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, the BlueHat Security Forum EU event is an invitation-only gathering and network of select government and enterprise decision-makers from throughout the European Union.  Attendee country representation includes Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.  Today’s Forum gathering in Brussels features lively presentations on the latest developments in information security from Microsoft leaders and external security researcher luminaries.

The primary objective of the BlueHat Security Forum is to build bridges between our Microsoft Security Leadership team, key Enterprise security stakeholders, and members of the security research community. The secondary objective is to participate in candid, actionable, and constructive dialogue with key enterprise customers that will help Microsoft produce enterprise-ready, value-laden products and services.  The BlueHat Security Forum planning team formulates discussion topics for these meetings based on current security hot topics, new research and trends.

Today's BlueHat Security Forum EU event agenda will address:

· E-crime attacks, the vulnerability economy and the global threat landscape

· Security in the cloud, DNS security, and the malware landscape

· Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) processes and integrating a Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)

And did I mention our stellar line up? J Presenters from Microsoft Trustworthy Computing include Andrew Cushman, Director of Trustworthy Computing Security; David Pollington, Director of Security, Europe; Vinny Gullotto, General Manager, Microsoft Malware Protection Center; Alex Lucas, Principal Security Development Lead; Mike Reavey, Director of MSRC; and from Global Foundation Services, Martin Rues, Director for Cloud Security, Microsoft & Scott Oxley, Lead Architect for Cloud Security, Microsoft. External presenters include Iftach Amit, Director, Security Research, Aladdin; Dragos Ruiu, CEO SecWest Conferences, Security Technology Specialist; Dan Kaminsky, Director of Penetration Testing, IOActive; and Scott Stender, Principal, iSEC Partners, Inc.

We are seeking to build upon the momentum of past events by showcasing how individual strategies can intersect to offer substantial benefits and positive-sum outcomes. As with the local BlueHat conference, we are looking to demystify global and regional security threats, and to create channels for productive information exchange on common threats between the security industry, governments and researchers. Future regional BlueHat Security Forums are planned for Asia in 2010 and LATAM in 2011.

Next up: save the date for BlueHat v9 this October 22-23 in Redmond. Stay tuned for more updates and information to come here and on the BlueHat Blog. Be sure to check out Iftach Ian Amit’s post also coinciding with the Forum, Getting a business degree as part of Security Research?

Bon chance!

Celene

 

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Marhaban! Maarten Van Horenbeeck here from the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). This is the first time I have blogged here on EcoStrat. As a Security Program Manager with MSRC, one of the roles I have is to work with security researchers, and this often involves attending security conferences to meet with you. Two weeks ago, a couple of us in Trustworthy Computing (TwC) attended the Hack in the Box (HITB) security conference in hot and sizzling Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

There is a saying that "every word in Arabic either means itself, its opposite, or a camel." Working in the information security industry, I often use this to illustrate to my clients how a piece of code that one person considers a vulnerability, can very well be seen as valid functionality by another. As such, my Microsoft colleagues and I were very interested in learning more about other Arabic sayings that could be applied to the information security industry as a whole. 

Hack in the Box is a twice-annual conference, taking place in Dubai, UAE during April, and somewhat later in the year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Given our past experiences with the value of the talks at the conference, Microsoft was a Titanium sponsor of this event.

The Dubai conference is more intimate than the Malaysia one, but that is exactly what makes it a great way for local information security professionals to network and learn more about cutting edge security research that is taking place all across the world. Presenters ventured from as far as Indonesia, the United States, and Germany.

At Microsoft, I think we can safely admit that in order to pioneer security efforts, we were forced to make every single mistake in the book and learn from it. When I started with the company, I was fascinated to see that we are in fact very good at learning. When we deal with an issue, we like to understand how we can resolve similar issues more effectively in the future. As such, we don’t just attend conferences to learn, but to start up a conversation – we are interested in sharing our own experiences as well as touching base with others.

Microsoft employees had two presentations lined up for this event. Mark Curphey, the director of Microsoft's Information Security Tools team, had a keynote presentation on security tools and technology for effective risk management. Mark focused on how most security tools and technology available to effectively manage risk can only be described as primitive in comparison to those used in most other areas of risk management, such as online gaming or healthcare. From my own experience as a security consultant, I can echo his finding that Microsoft Office Excel is often the most effective tool risk managers have at their disposal.

This is a gloomy situation, given the amount of risk most organizations are exposed to, but a broad sigh of relief was voiced by the audience when Mark clarified his team is working here at Microsoft on solving just that issue.

After Mark's talk, Ian Hellen from Microsoft's Security Assurance team and I spoke to several attendees who wanted to learn more about how M

icrosoft deals with application security issues. We understood from them that there is a lot of internal software development taking place in Dubai to support business processes, and many of the attendees asked questions about how they could make their own applications more secure. We talked to them about the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), which is our standardized approach to software security. If you have similar interests, you can read more about it here.

Billy Rios, one of our resident security engineers, delivered a fascinating presentation on the concept of trust relationships in Web applications, and more specifically how a disparity exists between the security models implemented in Web applications, and those implemented by the browsers that host those applications. In addition, he collaborated with Chris Evans from Google to share with the audience some of their experiences with cross-domain issues and practical man-in-the-middle attacks on SSL.

While there was too much content at the conference for me to discuss in depth here, I will mention some of the other highlights.

Roberto Preatoni from WabiSabiLabi, one of our guests at BlueHat 6, presented on cyber warfare. He refuted Marcus Ranum’s 2007 statement at HITB Malaysia that cyber warfare is an overrated issue, by calling out several examples of contemporary cyber war. He illustrated how it may not just affect nation-states but its conflicts of interest can affect industries and individual corporations as well.

Reverse engineers in the audience welcomed Sebastian Porst from Zynamics. He spoke about REIL, their Reverse Engineering Intermediate Language, and more specifically how it can be used to optimize static binary code analysis. They actually used one of our vulnerabilities, the Windows Server Service vulnerability patched in MS08-067 (read more about it here and here) to illustrate how their tool works. This was definitely a topic many of our own engineers are deeply interested in.

Another well received talk came from Wes Brown of IOActive. He provided a good primer on analyzing malicious code, and gave it a twist by describing how languages, Unicode, and even culture all make a difference and make the reverse engineer’s work just a wee bit more difficult.

At the end of the conference, Microsoft sponsored the sunset Post-Conference Reception, which allowed for more valuable networking opportunities.

Sometimes dealing with security incidents and vulnerabilities can feel like marching across a desert. Confidentiality is an unspoken requirement, and often you can only rely on your own senses, knowledge and intuition. It is a great thing that just like in Dubai, there are watering holes where we can come together and rely on each other implicitly, sharing information and improving the state of the art in our business. Thanks, Hack in the Box, for a great conference, and we’ll see you next time. Ma’a salama.

[Editor's note: check out the BlueHat Blog for another Microsoft perspective on HITB-Dubai]

 

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