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Microsoft Gives Money To Hackers
Microsoft has given out more than $250,000 in prize money to Black Hat hackers who found ways to protect its software. Redmond’s first Blue Hat prize were unveiled at a hip club at a mobbed party complete with dancers, high-energy DJ, and explosions of shimmering confetti.
The top prize of $200,000 went to doctoral student Vasilis Pappas. Pappas came up with a method to countering “the most popular attack technique” that Redmond is seeing at the moment. This is called Return-Oriented Programming which is a hacker technique that is often used to disable or circumvent a program’s computer security controls. Pappas came up with something called kBouncer which blocks anything that looks like an ROP attack from running.
Microsoft security response center senior director Mike Reavey said that Redmond posed a challenge to the researcher community and asked them to shift their focus from solely identifying and reporting individual vulnerabilities to investing in new lines of defensive research that could mitigate entire classes of attacks.
Microsoft Delivers Massive Security Updates
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Microsoft today patched a whopping 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), and other software, including 30 bugs in the Windows kernel device driver and one in IE that was exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last month.
The company also delivered a long-discussed “backport” to Office 2003 and Office 2007 that brings one of the newer security features in Office 2010 to the older editions.
The 17 updates, which Microsoft dubs “bulletins,” tied a record set late last year, but easily beat the October 2010 mark for the total number of flaws they fixed. Altogether, today’s updates patched 64 vulnerabilities, 15 more than in October and 24 more than in the former second-place collection of December 2010.
Nine of the 17 bulletins were pegged “critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat ranking, while the remainder were marked “important,” the next-most-serious label.
Microsoft and virtually every security expert pegged several updates that users should download and install immediately.
“There are three we think are top priorities,” said Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an interview earlier today. Bryant tagged MS11-018, MS11-019 and MS11-020 as the ASAP updates.