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Effective collaboration is key to the success of any organization. But perhaps none more so than those working towards the common goal of securing our connected world. That’s why Trend Micro has always been keen to reach out to industry partners in the security ecosystem, to help us collectively build a safer world and improve the level of protection we can offer our customers. As part of these efforts, we’ve worked closely with Microsoft for decades.
Trend Micro is therefore doubly honored to be at the Microsoft Security 20/20 awards event in February, with nominations for two of the night’s most prestigious prizes.
Better together
No organization exists in a vacuum. The hi-tech, connectivity-rich nature of modern business is the source of its greatest power, but also one of its biggest weaknesses. Trend Micro’s mission from day one has been to make this environment as safe as possible for our customers. But we learned early on that to deliver on this vision, we had to collaborate. That’s why we work closely with the world’s top platform and technology providers — to offer protection that is seamless and optimized for these environments.
As a Gold Application Development Partner we’ve worked for years with Microsoft to ensure our security is tightly integrated into its products, to offer protection for Azure, Windows and Office 365 customers — at the endpoint, on servers, for email and in the cloud. It’s all about simplified, optimized security designed to support business agility and growth.
Innovating our way to success
This is a vision that comes from the very top. For over three decades, our CEO and co-founder Eva Chen has been at the forefront of industry leading technology innovation and collaborative success at Trend Micro. Among other things during that time, we’ve released:
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Two awards
We’re delighted to have been singled out for two prestigious awards at the Microsoft Security 20/20 event, which will kick off RSA Conference this year:
Customer Impact
At Trend Micro, the customer is at the heart of everything we do. It’s the reason we have hundreds of researchers across 15 threat centers around the globe leading the fight against emerging black hat tools and techniques. It’s why we partner with leading technology providers like Microsoft. And it’s why the channel is so important for us.
Industry Changemaker: Eva Chen
It goes without saying that our CEO and co-founder is an inspirational figure within Trend Micro. Her vision and strong belief that our only real competition as cybersecurity vendors are the bad guys and that the industry needs to stand united against them to make the digital world a safer place, guides the over 6000 employees every day. But she’s also had a major impact on the industry at large, working tirelessly over the years to promote initiatives that have ultimately made our connected world more secure. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Eva’s foresight and dedication, the cybersecurity industry would be a much poorer place.
We’re all looking forward to the event, and for the start of 2020. As we enter a new decade, Trend Micro’s innovation and passion to make the digital world a safer place has never been more important.
The post Celebrating Decades of Success with Microsoft at the Security 20/20 Awards appeared first on .
Introduction The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced individuals and organizations to adopt new ways of doing daily tasks, from working to learning. It has also accelerated the journey to the cloud for many organizations; for others, it has made them more reliant on the cloud. With that move comes a demand for professionals with cloud […]
The post Microsoft Azure Certification: Overview And Career Path appeared first on Infosec Resources.
Introduction The business world is relocating to the cloud and the trend is strong. It has been predicted that by the end of 2020, 83% of all businesses will be in the cloud and by 2021, the percentage of workloads processed in cloud data centers will reach 94%. By 2022, cloud services will be three […]
The post Microsoft Azure job outlook appeared first on Infosec Resources.
Microsoft has shipped an emergency security update affecting most Windows users. This update partially addresses a security vulnerability known as PrintNightmare that could allow remote hackers to take over your system.
PrintNightmare could allow hackers to gain control of your computer. This means hackers could perform malicious activities like installing their own apps, stealing your data, and creating new user accounts.
Microsoft recommends Windows 10, 8.1, and 7 users update their computers through Windows Update as soon as possible. Note that an additional patch will likely be required to fully fix the issue, so expect another update prompt from Microsoft in the days to come.
For extra protection against malware that may result from a hack like this one, we recommend an all-in-one security solution, like McAfee Total Protection or McAfee LiveSafe. If a hacker takes advantage of the exploit and tries to install additional malware, McAfee Total Protection/LiveSafe can help protect against those attempts. Learn more about our online security products here.
PrintNightmare exploits a vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler service. The step-by-step instructions below will guide you through turning off the service to ensure hackers can no longer exploit the security flaw. The Print Spooler will remain off until the PC is rebooted.
Step 1: Press the Windows key, and type Services, clicking on the Services App
Step 2: Scroll down to the Print Spooler Service
Step 3: Right-click on the Print Spooler Service and click Stop.
The post Microsoft Urges Customers to Update Windows as Soon as Possible appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Apple, Google and Microsoft announced this week they will soon support an approach to authentication that avoids passwords altogether, and instead requires users to merely unlock their smartphones to sign in to websites or online services. Experts say the changes should help defeat many types of phishing attacks and ease the overall password burden on Internet users, but caution that a true passwordless future may still be years away for most websites.
Image: Blog.google
The tech giants are part of an industry-led effort to replace passwords, which are easily forgotten, frequently stolen by malware and phishing schemes, or leaked and sold online in the wake of corporate data breaches.
Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the more active contributors to a passwordless sign-in standard crafted by the FIDO (“Fast Identity Online”) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), groups that have been working with hundreds of tech companies over the past decade to develop a new login standard that works the same way across multiple browsers and operating systems.
According to the FIDO Alliance, users will be able to sign in to websites through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices — including a device PIN, or a biometric such as a fingerprint or face scan.
“This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS,” the alliance wrote on May 5.
Sampath Srinivas, director of security authentication at Google and president of the FIDO Alliance, said that under the new system your phone will store a FIDO credential called a “passkey” which is used to unlock your online account.
“The passkey makes signing in far more secure, as it’s based on public key cryptography and is only shown to your online account when you unlock your phone,” Srinivas wrote. “To sign into a website on your computer, you’ll just need your phone nearby and you’ll simply be prompted to unlock it for access. Once you’ve done this, you won’t need your phone again and you can sign in by just unlocking your computer.”
As ZDNet notes, Apple, Google and Microsoft already support these passwordless standards (e.g. “Sign in with Google”), but users need to sign in at every website to use the passwordless functionality. Under this new system, users will be able to automatically access their passkey on many of their devices — without having to re-enroll every account — and use their mobile device to sign into an app or website on a nearby device.
Johannes Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute, called the announcement “by far the most promising effort to solve the authentication challenge.”
“The most important part of this standard is that it will not require users to buy a new device, but instead they may use devices they already own and know how to use as authenticators,” Ullrich said.
Steve Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University and an early internet researcher and pioneer, called the passwordless effort a “huge advance” in authentication, but said it will take a very long time for many websites to catch up.
Bellovin and others say one potentially tricky scenario in this new passwordless authentication scheme is what happens when someone loses their mobile device, or their phone breaks and they can’t recall their iCloud password.
“I worry about people who can’t afford an extra device, or can’t easily replace a broken or stolen device,” Bellovin said. “I worry about forgotten password recovery for cloud accounts.”
Google says that even if you lose your phone, “your passkeys will securely sync to your new phone from cloud backup, allowing you to pick up right where your old device left off.”
Apple and Microsoft likewise have cloud backup solutions that customers using those platforms could use to recover from a lost mobile device. But Bellovin said much depends on how securely such cloud systems are administered.
“How easy is it to add another device’s public key to an account, without authorization?” Bellovin wondered. “I think their protocols make it impossible, but others disagree.”
Nicholas Weaver, a lecturer at the computer science department at University of California, Berkeley, said websites still have to have some recovery mechanism for the “you lost your phone and your password” scenario, which he described as “a really hard problem to do securely and already one of the biggest weaknesses in our current system.”
“If you forget the password and lose your phone and can recover it, now this is a huge target for attackers,” Weaver said in an email. “If you forget the password and lose your phone and CAN’T, well, now you’ve lost your authorization token that is used for logging in. It is going to have to be the latter. Apple has the infrastructure in place to support it (iCloud keychain), but it is unclear if Google does.”
Even so, he said, the overall FIDO approach has been a great tool for improving both security and usability.
“It is a really, really good step forward, and I’m delighted to see this,” Weaver said. “Taking advantage of the phone’s strong authentication of the phone owner (if you have a decent passcode) is quite nice. And at least for the iPhone you can make this robust even to phone compromise, as it is the secure enclave that would handle this and the secure enclave doesn’t trust the host operating system.”
The tech giants said the new passwordless capabilities will be enabled across Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms “over the course of the coming year.” But experts said it will likely take several more years for smaller web destinations to adopt the technology and ditch passwords altogether.
Recent research shows far too many people still reuse or recycle passwords (modifying the same password slightly), which presents an account takeover risk when those credentials eventually get exposed in a data breach. A report in March from cybersecurity firm SpyCloud found 64 percent of users reuse passwords for multiple accounts, and that 70 percent of credentials compromised in previous breaches are still in use.
A March 2022 white paper on the FIDO approach is available here (PDF). A FAQ on it is here.
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 74 separate security problems in its Windows operating systems and related software. This month’s patch batch includes fixes for seven “critical” flaws, as well as a zero-day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows.
By all accounts, the most urgent bug Microsoft addressed this month is CVE-2022-26925, a weakness in a central component of Windows security (the “Local Security Authority” process within Windows). CVE-2022-26925 was publicly disclosed prior to today, and Microsoft says it is now actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw affects Windows 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2022.
Greg Wiseman, product manager for Rapid7, said Microsoft has rated this vulnerability as important and assigned it a CVSS (danger) score of 8.1 (10 being the worst), although Microsoft notes that the CVSS score can be as high as 9.8 in certain situations.
“This allows attackers to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to force domain controllers to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM authentication,” Wiseman said. “This is very bad news when used in conjunction with an NTLM relay attack, potentially leading to remote code execution. This bug affects all supported versions of Windows, but Domain Controllers should be patched on a priority basis before updating other servers.”
Wiseman said the most recent time Microsoft patched a similar vulnerability — last August in CVE-2021-36942 — it was also being exploited in the wild under the name “PetitPotam.”
“CVE-2021-36942 was so bad it made CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities,” Wiseman said.
Seven of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, which it assigns to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to remotely compromise a vulnerable Windows system without any help from the user.
Among those is CVE-2022-26937, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and affects services using the Windows Network File System (NFS). Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that this bug could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code in the context of the Network File System (NFS) service on affected systems.
“NFS isn’t on by default, but it’s prevalent in environment where Windows systems are mixed with other OSes such as Linux or Unix,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “If this describes your environment, you should definitely test and deploy this patch quickly.”
Once again, this month’s Patch Tuesday is sponsored by Windows Print Spooler, a core Windows service that keeps spooling out the security hits. May’s patches include four fixes for Print Spooler, including two information disclosure and two elevation of privilege flaws.
“All of the flaws are rated as important, and two of the three are considered more likely to be exploited,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “Windows Print Spooler continues to remain a valuable target for attackers since PrintNightmare was disclosed nearly a year ago. Elevation of Privilege flaws in particular should be carefully prioritized, as we’ve seen ransomware groups like Conti favor them as part of its playbook.”
Other Windows components that received patches this month include .NET and Visual Studio, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Authentication Methods, BitLocker, Remote Desktop Client, and Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.
Also today, Adobe issued five security bulletins to address at least 18 flaws in Adobe CloudFusion, Framemaker, InCopy, InDesign, and Adobe Character Animator. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in today’s updates.
For a more granular look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix 60 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day flaw in all supported Microsoft Office versions on all flavors of Windows that’s seen active exploitation for at least two months now. On a lighter note, Microsoft is officially retiring its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, which turns 27 years old this year.
Three of the bugs tackled this month earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” label, meaning they can be exploited remotely by malware or miscreants to seize complete control over a vulnerable system. On top of the critical heap this month is CVE-2022-30190, a vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), a service built into Windows.
Dubbed “Follina,” the flaw became public knowledge on May 27, when a security researcher tweeted about a malicious Word document that had surprisingly low detection rates by antivirus products. Researchers soon learned that the malicious document was using a feature in Word to retrieve a HTML file from a remote server, and that HTML file in turn used MSDT to load code and execute PowerShell commands.
“What makes this new MS Word vulnerability unique is the fact that there are no macros exploited in this attack,” writes Mayuresh Dani, manager of threat research at Qualys. “Most malicious Word documents leverage the macro feature of the software to deliver their malicious payload. As a result, normal macro-based scanning methods will not work to detect Follina. All an attacker needs to do is lure a targeted user to download a Microsoft document or view an HTML file embedded with the malicious code.”
Kevin Beaumont, the researcher who gave Follina its name, penned a fairly damning account and timeline of Microsoft’s response to being alerted about the weakness. Beaumont says researchers in March 2021 told Microsoft they were able achieve the same exploit using Microsoft Teams as an example, and that Microsoft silently fixed the issue in Teams but did not patch MSDT in Windows or the attack vector in Microsoft Office.
Beaumont said other researchers on April 12, 2022 told Microsoft about active exploitation of the MSDT flaw, but Microsoft closed the ticket saying it wasn’t a security issue. Microsoft finally issued a CVE for the problem on May 30, the same day it released recommendations on how to mitigate the threat from the vulnerability.
Microsoft also is taking flak from security experts regarding a different set of flaws in its Azure cloud hosting platform. Orca Security said that back on January 4 it told Microsoft about a critical bug in Azure’s Synapse service that allowed attackers to obtain credentials to other workspaces, execute code, or leak customer credentials to data sources outside of Azure.
In an update to their research published Tuesday, Orca researchers said they were able to bypass Microsoft’s fix for the issue twice before the company put a working fix in place.
“In previous cases, vulnerabilities were fixed by the cloud providers within a few days of our disclosure to the affected vendor,” wrote Orca’s Avi Shua. “Based on our understanding of the architecture of the service, and our repeated bypasses of fixes, we think that the architecture contains underlying weaknesses that should be addressed with a more robust tenant separation mechanism. Until a better solution is implemented, we advise that all customers assess their usage of the service and refrain from storing sensitive data or keys in it.”
Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable and a former U.S. cybersecurity czar, took Microsoft to task for silently patching an issue Tenable reported in the same Azure Synapse service.
“It was only after being told that we were going to go public, that their story changed…89 days after the initial vulnerability notification…when they privately acknowledged the severity of the security issue,” Yoran wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “To date, Microsoft customers have not been notified. Without timely and detailed disclosures, customers have no idea if they were, or are, vulnerable to attack…or if they fell victim to attack prior to a vulnerability being patched. And not notifying customers denies them the opportunity to look for evidence that they were or were not compromised, a grossly irresponsible policy.”
Also in the critical and notable stack this month is CVE-2022-30136, which is a remote code execution flaw in the Windows Network File System (NFS version 4.1) that earned a CVSS score of 9.8 (10 being the worst). Microsoft issued a very similar patch last month for vulnerabilities in NFS versions 2 and 3.
“This vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute privileged code on affected systems running NFS. On the surface, the only difference between the patches is that this month’s update fixes a bug in NFSV4.1, whereas last month’s bug only affected versions NSFV2.0 and NSFV3.0,” wrote Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “It’s not clear if this is a variant or a failed patch or a completely new issue. Regardless, enterprises running NFS should prioritize testing and deploying this fix.”
Beginning today, Microsoft will officially stop supporting most versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, which was launched in August 1995. The IE desktop application will be disabled, and Windows users who wish to stick with a Microsoft browser are encouraged to move to Microsoft Edge with IE mode, which will be supported through at least 2029.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the dirt on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
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