Microsoft is patching Windows 8 but NOT Windows 7 !?

[hackerman1]

Redmond is patching Windows 8 but NOT Windows 7, say security bods

“New tool checks differences, could lead to 0-day bonanza
By Darren Pauli, 6 Jun 2014

Microsoft has left Windows 7 exposed by only applying patches to its newest operating systems.
Researchers found the gaps after they scanned 900 Windows libraries,
and uncovered a variety of security functions that were updated in W8, but not in W7.
They said the shortcoming could lead to the discovery of zero day vulnerabilities.
The missing safe functions were part of Microsoft’s dedicated libraries intsafe.h and strsafe.h,
that help developers combat various attacks.

Researcher Moti Joseph – formerly of Websense – speculated Microsoft had not applied fixes to W7 to save money.
“Why is it that Microsoft inserted a safe function into W8 but not W7 ?
The answer is money – Microsoft does not want to waste development time on older operating systems…
and they want people to move to higher operating systems,” Joseph said in a presentation at the Troopers14 conference.
Microsoft has been contacted for comment.

Together with malware analyst Marion Marschalek
the duo developed a capable diffing (comparison) tool dubbed DiffRay, which would compare W8 with W7,
and log any safe functions absent in the older platform.
It was “scary simple”, Marschalek said, and faster than finding vulnerabilities by hand.

Security bods could then probe and pluck those functions to identify vulnerabilities and exploits.
In a demonstration of DiffRay, the researchers found four missing safe functions in W7 that were present in W8.
“If we get one zero-day from this project, it’s worth it,” Joseph said.
Future work will extend DiffRay’s capabilities to find potential vulnerabilities in W8.1,
add intelligence to trace input values for functions, and incorporate more intelligent signatures used to find potential holes.
Duplicates and abundant false positives in the current version would also be ironed out.
“
Note: quoted text above edited by me to make it easier to read in the forum.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/06/patch_piker_redmond_means_win_8_fixes_skip_7_researchers_say/

Watch the video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=s_7Cy2w2dCw

Download presentation (PDF): https://www.troopers.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TROOPERS14-What_Happens_In_Windows_7_Stays_In_Windows_7-Marion_Marschalek+Joseph_Moti.pdf

This is bad news for all WS2008-R2 users.
Remember that WS2008-R2 is the server-version of W7….
It´s going to be very interesting to hear Microsofts comment about this.

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