Great news: I got invited to Microsoft Zero Day Quest onsite event.

Bad news: It overlaps with my kid's estimated due date 😅

Happy hacking to all of you who's planning to go to Redmond 😎

Another year, another Microsoft Most Valuable Researcher for me. This year, it has a bittersweet taste though.

Let’s kick off with the sweet part.

I’m quite happy with my consistency and findings. My record for 2024:
- 10x Exchange
- 2x SharePoint
- 1x .NET/VS

Multiple RCEs included.

I have also already reported several vulns for 2025, and I’m happy with the technical level of the findings. Not necessarily with the impact, but you don’t always get RCE;). I’m especially happy with the fact that I’m doing some risky deep dives, and sometimes it pays off.

I’m also happy with some recent research. I’ve been abusing unknown attack surfaces and I had some success with that (even though I was not familiar with the target). At least some of them are unknown according to my knowledge, so even if they are known, it does not count, right? :)

Now the bitter part.

Over the entire year, I had an impression that MSRC leaderboard is missing points for the majority of my submissions. I was signalizing this issue a couple of times, but with no effect. I was even not on the initial MVR list.

After my small tweet, some of my missing points were found and I eventually made it to the list (thx MSRC for this intervention). The truth is – the list is not so important to me. I like to think about vuln disclosure as some mutually respected process.

I’m not collecting bounties (reporting as ZDI) and the only thing I want in return for my submissions is a proper acknowledgment. I think that this process failed in 2024, but I hope it will eventually get better. I have impression that I should have way more points, but whatever.

Another part – several of my submissions were rejected as an expected behavior. Not a nice feeling, but it’s a part of the game. I can see a lot of tweets about dropped submissions and this part concerns everybody. From my perspective, reporting of .NET vulns is hardest.

I have a small perception that if you cannot exploit something that you consider a .NET vuln in Exchange or SharePoint, it’s probably going to be ignored (based on my experience only). Well guess what, there are different products/apps based on .NET too :D

To sum up, quite a good year. Hoping to have an even better 2025, although my Exchange run from 2023/2024 will be hard to repeat.

I hope to deliver some nice research and to see you next year during conferences or wherever. Cheers