Microsoft is reporting that an Emotat malware infection shut down a network by causing computers to overheat and then crash. The Emotet payload was delivered and executed on the systems of Fabrikam — a fake name Microsoft gave the victim in their case study — five days after the employee’s user credentials were exfiltrated to … Read More “Emotat Malware Causes Physical Damage” »
Category: microsoft
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Yesterday’s Microsoft Windows patches included a fix for a critical vulnerability in the system’s crypto library. A spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing certificate to sign a malicious executable, making it appear the file was … Read More “Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA” »
There’s no indication that this vulnerability was ever used in the wild, but the code it was discovered in — Microsoft’s Text Services Framework — has been around since Windows XP. Powered by WPeMatico
Evil Clippy is a tool for creating malicious Microsoft Office macros: At BlackHat Asia we released Evil Clippy, a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others, Evil Clippy can hide VBA macros, stomp VBA code (via p-code) and confuse popular macro analysis tools. It runs on … Read More “Malicious MS Office Macro Creator” »
Google and Microsoft researchers have disclosed another Spectre-like CPU side-channel vulnerability, called “Speculative Store Bypass.” Like the others, the fix will slow the CPU down. The German tech site Heise reports that more are coming. I’m not surprised. Writing about Spectre and Meltdown in January, I predicted that we’ll be seeing a lot more of … Read More “Another Spectre-Like CPU Vulnerability” »
There’s a newly discovered bug in Internet Explorer that allows any currently visited website to learn the contents of the address bar when the user hits enter. This feels important; the site I am at now has no business knowing where I go next. Powered by WPeMatico
Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports: One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft’s Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the … Read More “NSA Collects MS Windows Error Information” »
In April, the Shadow Brokers — presumably Russia — released a batch of Windows exploits from what is presumably the NSA. Included in that release were eight different Windows vulnerabilities. Given a presumed theft date of the data as sometime between 2012 and 2013 — based on timestamps of the documents and the limited Windows … Read More “Zero-Day Vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA Tools Released by the Shadow Brokers” »
A set of documents in Pakistan were detected as forgeries because their fonts were not in circulation at the time the documents were dated. Powered by WPeMatico
Last week, Microsoft issued a security patch for Windows XP, a 16-year-old operating system that Microsoft officially no longer supports. Last month, Microsoft issued a Windows XP patch for the vulnerability used in WannaCry. Is this a good idea? This 2014 essay argues that it’s not: The zero-day flaw and its exploitation is unfortunate, and … Read More “Is Continuing to Patch Windows XP a Mistake?” »