As most of you as well, I was looking for information and opinions on Cloud Security over the last year. I found a lot of papers but when I talk to our customers I realize that they think about the Cloud but Cloud Security is mainly something for the specialists – which it is not for me. Therefore I was looking into preparing something on a management level which is easy to read and understand and finally makes more appetite to look deeper into the subject.

Probably the biggest challenge we had was to make sure that we do not oversimplify. Finally, we did not want re-invent the wheel. There is very good material out there e.g. from the Cloud Security Alliance and ENISA which I rather reference than do something similar.

At the end we came up with two new papers. One is written by our Trustworthy Computing organization and is a high-level overview of the Cloud and the corresponding security opportunities and challenges. You can find it here: Security in Cloud Computing Overview.

Additionally Doug Cavit – a Principal Security Strategist at Microsoft – and me were working on core considerations you have to make when you include the Cloud into you IT strategy. The paper is located here: Cloud Computing Security Considerations. This is the paper I would like to get your feedback on. Please keep the target audience in mind. In other words, if you give this paper to your CIO or even your CEO, if you would give it to a government elite in your country or a journalist – what is your view on it? What are you missing? What is good?

To set your expectations: I will answer all mails with constructive feedback but as I am heavily on the road over the next few months, give me a little bit more than 24 hours (which I try to have normally) – but I will come back to you, promised! If you think that a call might be more accurate as you have so much to say, we might be able to do that – depending on the number of requests. What I cannot promise is that we include all the feedback into a next version – if a next version is needed. My experience shows that feedback is sometimes contradicting each other and sometimes I will disagree – and we might to have to sort that out.

So, you are definitely free to use the documents and if you would even be willing to take the time to give us feedback, I would highly appreciate. My mail is roger.halbheer@microsoft.com – looking forward to a lot of mails!

Roger

As you might know, it was time for the Data Protection Day in Europe again. Unfortunately I did not find the videos from this year’s competition yet but I guess we will find them later on the page and on YouTube.

However, we released a study on Privacy which is pretty interesting. Find the summary here Microsoft Releases a Study on Data Privacy Day

And there you can see a video as well which summarizes the results of the study:

Roger

Just to make sure you have seen that: We just released a blog Security Advisory 979352 – Going out of Band

Quoting the blog:

Based on our comprehensive monitoring of the threat landscape we continue to see very limited, and in some cases, targeted attacks.  To date, the only successful attacks that we are aware of have been against Internet Explorer 6.

[…]

Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability.

The release-time will be communicated tomorrow.

So, from my point of view, you should do two things now:

1. Deploy the Security Update as soon as it is out
2. Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 if you have not done so yet

Roger

There was and still is a lot of noise regarding the Internet Explorer vulnerability reported in Microsoft Security Advisory 979352 – including the normal discussion about which browser is most secure. A discussion I do not want to get into here but I think it is necessary to lay out the facts instead of all the rumors out there. George Stathakopoulos, General Manager in Trustworthy Computing and overall responsible for our response processes, published a blog tonight: Further Insight into Security Advisory 979352 and the Threat Landscape which is definitely worth reading for all of you.

I think the most important statements in there are:

The attacks that we have seen to date, including public proof-of-concept exploit code, are only effective against Internet Explorer 6. Based on a rigorous analysis of multiple sources, we are not aware of any successful attacks against IE7 and IE8 at this time.

So, if it really happens that you still run Internet Explorer 6, get off of it – as soon as possible. This basically has nothing to do with the vulnerability in discussion. This is a general security-related activity.

and finally:

Customers who are using Windows XP SP2 should be sure to upgrade to both IE8 and enable Data Execution Protection (DEP), or upgrade to Windows XP SP3 which enables DEP by default, as soon as possible.

Roger

I guess you might have seen it by now but if not, please make sure you read and understand the material available:

This night we released a Security Advisory on a Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution. The reason for that is that our investigations have shown that this vulnerability was one of the attack vectors used in the recent attacks against Google. So, please read the blog post of our Microsoft Security Response Center on the release of the advisory.

I just want to quote some of the key elements in there:

Based upon our investigations, we have determined that Internet Explorer was one of the vectors used in targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google and possibly other corporate networks.

[…]

Our teams are currently working to develop an update and we will take appropriate action to protect customers when the update has met the quality bar for broad distribution. That may include releasing the update out of band.

[…]

Customers should also enable Data Execution Prevention (DEP) which helps mitigate online attacks. DEP is enabled by default in IE 8 but must be manually enabled in prior versions.

There are some additional mitigations shown in the advisory. However, a few things from my side:

• Yes, it is a vulnerability and we do everything to fix it in time without breaking your systems. So, even though we all understand the urgency of an update, it has to be tested. There is a good chance that soon somebody will release an update for this vulnerability not coming from us. The past experience has shown that those updates usually are not tested thoroughly and that there is a good chance that it will break certain systems. Often this risk is higher than the risk of being attacked in my opinion.
• Make sure that you are watching our internet sites in case we go out of band.
• Use the protections built in to the Operating System and the browser. E.g. Data Execution Prevention as mentioned above. Yes, it breaks certain applications. On my system, where I switched DEP completely on, I had to exclude my Sony Reader software as it did not work – it was terminated and it took me a while to figure out why. But this is the only application which had to be excluded. Switch that on (use Group Policies) in Internet Explorer as well.

I realized that it might be necessary to give an introduction in how to switch DEP on and I therefore wrote a post on that as well today: Leveraging Data Execution Prevention (DEP)

Roger