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MSRC

Security Research & Defense

Congratulations to the MSRC 2024 Most Valuable Security Researchers!

Tuesday, August 06, 2024

The Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program offers public thanks and recognition to security researchers who help protect our customers through discovering and sharing security vulnerabilities under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. Today, we are excited to recognize this year’s 100 Most Valuable Researchers (MVRs), based on the total number of points earned for each valid report.

Microsoft Bounty Program Year in Review: $16.6M in Rewards 

Monday, August 05, 2024

We are excited to announce that this year the Microsoft Bounty Program has awarded $16.6M in bounty awards to 343 security researchers from 55 countries, securing Microsoft customers in partnership with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). Each year we identify over a thousand potential security issues together, safeguarding our customers from possible threats through the Microsoft Bounty Program.

Congratulations to the Top MSRC 2024 Q2 Security Researchers!

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Congratulations to all the researchers recognized in this quarter’s Microsoft Researcher Recognition Program leaderboard! Thank you to everyone for your hard work and continued partnership to secure customers. The top three researchers of the 2024 Q2 Security Researcher Leaderboard are Yuki Chen, Lewis Lee & Ver & Zhiniang Peng, and Wei!

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 2

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

This is the second installment of the Azure Serial Console blog, which provides insights to improve defenders’ preparedness when investigating Azure Serial Console activity on Azure Linux virtual machines. While the first blog post discussed various tracing activities, such as using Azure activity and Sysmon logs on Windows virtual machines to trace serial console activity, this blog outlines how to enable logging for Azure Linux virtual machines using Sysmon for Linux to capture and how to send these events to a log analytics workspace.

Microsoft mitigated exposure of internal information in a storage account due to overly-permissive SAS token

Monday, September 18, 2023

Summary As part of a recent Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) report from Wiz.io, Microsoft investigated and remediated an incident involving a Microsoft employee who shared a URL for a blob store in a public GitHub repository while contributing to open-source AI learning models. This URL included an overly-permissive Shared Access Signature (SAS) token for an internal storage account.

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 1

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Ever had a virtual machine crash? Azure Serial console is a great way to directly connect to your Virtual machine and debug what went wrong. Azure Serial Console is a feature that’s available for free for everyone. While the primary intent of this feature is to assist users debug their machine, there are several interesting ways to abuse the features and compromise sensitive information.

Best practices regarding Azure Storage Keys, Azure Functions, and Azure Role Based Access

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Summary Azure provides developers and security operations staff a wide array of configurable security options to meet organizational needs. Throughout the software development lifecycle, it is important for customers to understand the shared responsibility model, as well as be familiar with various security best practices. This is particularly important in deploying Azure Functions and in provisioning Azure Role Based Access Control as customers are responsible for configuring and managing applications, identity, and data.

First steps in CHERIoT Security Research

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

At Microsoft, we invest a lot of time researching and investigating possibilities in our journey to memory safety. Because the massive majority of existing codebases are written in unsafe programming languages, the task of protecting legacy code is very important. Hardware solutions are an attractive approach because they introduce very powerful security properties with low overheads compared to purely software solutions.

Announcing the Microsoft Machine Learning Membership Inference Competition (MICO)

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new competition focusing on the security and privacy of machine learning (ML) systems. Machine learning has already become a key enabler in many products and services, and this trend is likely to continue. It is therefore critical to understand the security and privacy guarantees provided by state-of-the-art ML algorithms – indeed this is one of Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles.