Black Cat Security

Earlier today we announced MSRC’s 2018-2019 Most Valuable Security Researchers at Black Hat. The following 75 researchers hail from all corners of the world and possess varied experience and skills, yet all of them have contributed to securing the Microsoft’s customers and the broader ecosystem.
For over a decade, one of Microsoft’s partners in vulnerability research and disclosure has been Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative.

Several sources estimate that by the year 2020 some 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide. IoT devices are purposefully designed to connect to a network and many are simply connected to the internet with little management or oversight. Such devices still must be identifiable, maintained, and monitored by security teams, especially in large complex enterprises.

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 individuals to come and do their worst to emulate criminal hackers in a customer-safe cloud environment called the Azure Security Lab.

Who’s going to be on the Most Valuable Security Researcher list at Black Hat USA 2019? We’re not announcing the names—yet—but this is how we’ll determine who’s there.
How do we define the Most Valuable Security Researchers?
The list at Black Hat will be the top tier of researchers based on not just the volume of the reports, but also the impact and accuracy of their reports.

We’re getting close to Black Hat, and we hope to see you there. Here’s where you can find members of the Microsoft Security Response Center if you’d like to say hello, ask a question about a report you made, discuss a recent blog article, or just show us pictures of your dog.

We deeply appreciate the partnership of the many talented security researchers who report vulnerabilities to Microsoft through Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. We pay bounties for research in key areas, and each year at Black Hat USA, we’ve recognized the most impactful researchers helping to protect the ecosystem. That’s not changing; we’re continuing to expand our bounty programs and will continue to recognize researchers with the greatest impact on the security ecosystem.

Today we announce the top organizational candidates for Vulnerability Top Contributors, Threat Indicator Top Submitters, and Zero-Day Top Reporting for the period of July 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019.
The Microsoft Active Protections Program provides security and protection to customers through cooperation and collaboration with industry leading partners. This bi-directional sharing program of threat and vulnerability data has proven instrumental to help prevent broad attacks and quickly resolve security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and services.

In this series, we have explored the need for proactive measures to eliminate a class of vulnerabilities and walked through some examples of memory safety issues we’ve found in Microsoft code that could have been avoided with a different language. Now we’ll peek at why we think that Rust represents the best alternative to C and C++ currently available.

In our first post in this series, we discussed the need for proactively addressing memory safety issues. Tools and guidance are demonstrably not preventing this class of vulnerabilities; memory safety issues have represented almost the same proportion of vulnerabilities assigned a CVE for over a decade. We feel that using memory-safe languages will mitigate this in ways that tools and training have not been able to.

One of Microsoft’s many security investments to protect customers is in the partnerships we build with the external security research community. We are excited to announce the launch of theDynamics 365 Bounty program and welcome researchers to seek out and disclose any high impact vulnerabilities they may find in Dynamics 365.