Avoid Windows Denial of Service

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Microsoft on Tuesday is set to release six security updates, three of which it has deemed critical and apply only to versions of Windows other than Windows 7. Microsoft released advance notice of its , on Nov. 5. The bulletin itself will be released on Tuesday along with remedies, as per its normal patch cycle. Other alerts are labeled "important," one of which involves a denial of service vulnerability for Windows; the other two affect Excel. Redmond will reportedly release updates for Windows XP, 2003 and 2007 and Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac OS X.

Save the one warning of DoS attacks, all the vulnerabilities involve remote code execution, as did the , fixing nearly three dozen flaws, all of them critical. A critical warning is one "whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action," according to the company, while one that is one step down at important, is said to be one that "could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources."

Microsoft on Monday also released an , the part of its October patch-fest that applied to Internet Explorer. This one, which went somewhat under the radar, as explained on the company's technet Website, addresses the way pages are rendered.

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Following 's bulletin notice, practical mitigation and verification steps are provided here to reduce exposure to a Windows denial-of-service while vendor fixes are validated and deployed.

Immediate mitigations (short window, pre-patch)

  • Isolate affected hosts onto a management VLAN or remove public routing until fixes are applied.
  • Apply perimeter ACLs or firewall rules to block or rate-limit unsolicited inbound traffic to service ports.
  • Use the host firewall to limit listening services to known management ranges only.
  • Stop or disable nonessential services that listen on the network; recycle application pools or services showing resource exhaustion.
  • Add temporary connection throttles at the web server or load balancer (limit connections per IP, tighten timeouts).
  • Enable or tune IDS/IPS and edge-rate limiting; temporarily blackhole or geo-block aggressive sources when appropriate.

Patch deployment checklist (safe rollout)

  • Stage patches in an environment that matches production, run automated and manual regression tests, and confirm backups or VM snapshots exist for quick rollback.
  • Approve and push updates in phased waves (pilot → critical → broad), monitor each wave for functional regressions, and keep an emergency rollback plan documented.
  • Use centralized update tooling (WSUS, SCCM, or equivalent) to track approvals and deployment status.

Quick detection and troubleshooting tips

  • Watch resource counters (CPU, memory, network bytes/sec, TCP connection counts) and Event Viewer (System/Application) for signs of exhaustion.

  • Capture active connection lists and map to processes:

    netstat -ano | findstr ESTABLISHED
tasklist /FI "PID eq <pid>"
typeperf "\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec" -si 5 -sc 10

  • Preserve packet captures and IDS logs for any suspected exploitation to aid forensic analysis.

Final notes
Document every change, keep patch-test results and logs with the incident record, and follow the vendor advisory for the official fix and any supported workarounds.

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