Pierluigi Paganini
April 28, 2015
Redmond’s security heads trust – Matt Miller, Tim Rains and David Watson – claim its patch wrecking-ball, employed only to out of the date Java installations previous year, which forced 90 percent of that particular platform’s online hackers to shift to Flash.
“2014 saw a shift from a balanced targeting of Java and Flash to over 90 per cent focus on Flash,” Redmond security team reported last week to RSA San Franciisco. “The drop in Java exploits corresponds to a new Internet Explorer feature which blocks the use of out-of-date Java.”
Now the challenge to develop Flashy-hacks is heating-up. Five out of eight completely new exploits proved helpful into exploit-kits previous year specifically targeted Adobe, whilst three of all those five had been exploited within ten days of general public vulnerability acknowledgment.
To demonstrate the accomplishment, Redmond team say the most recent HanJuan advertising-Flash flaw (CVE-2015-0311) affected over 5 million machines.
Microsoft won’t say whether or not it programs to block unpatched Flash installs, nevertheless, telling El-Reg it doesn’t comment on upcoming functionality.
Almost all of the Windows 8.1 clients run up-to-date Flash installations; often the pain is a lot more acute for Windows7 users, and among which almost 20 percent have been unsuccessful to patch.
Rains said to Vulture South that is perhaps because of defensive features being deployed recently, as in last year lately, a 70 percent drop in RCE (remote code execution) bugs & increased Windows patching times.
“There has been increased usage of Microsoft Update and Windows Update services over the years… a decline of more than 70 per cent in the total number of remote code execution vulnerabilities that were exploited in Microsoft products between 2010 and 2014… Fewer exploitable vulnerabilities, [and] new security mitigations,” Rains says.
Brain trust of Microsoft bleats that its 5 IE (Internet Explorer) defenses have significantly degraded the capability of black-hats to crack down the browser, using 6 different exploits in year 2014 simply being reduced to only two after the “hardening” was switched-on.
Both 0day and remote code execution vulnerabilities have dropped since 2010 year, making the first flaw’s account for the larger percentage portion of entire bugs.
Total zero day exploits was 28 percent being 13 in 2013, although six RCE security bugs had been exploited within 30 days after a patch was released, it decreased bugs by 86 percent since 2010. Nearly all RCE assaults in the last 2 years have utilized return focused programming and forgotten stack problem, the latter falling from 54.2 percent of RCE within 2007 to almost nothing last year.
Rains states this is because of the Redmond in year 2006 killing off almost all the known vulnerable computer functions, especially buffer over-runs, by ‘deprecating’ a subsection of the C run time collection.
“At first, this requirement was simply articulated in the form of a list of bad APIs, but it changed over time to become a header file (Banned.h), that could be used in conjunction with a compiler to help provide an automated method of sanitising source code. This became a requirement in the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle, which developers at Microsoft use to develop software. Two other factors that could also be contributing to this decline are the increasing prevalence of exploit mitigations for stack corruption issues (such as /GS and SafeSEH) and the increasing effectiveness of static analysis tools designed to detect such vulnerabilities.”
Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com
Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57
(Security Affairs – Jave, hacking)
