Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, a relatively light Patch Tuesday this month for Windows users. The software giant also responded to a torrent of negative feedback on a new feature of Redmondβs flagship operating system that constantly takes screenshots of whatever users are doing on their computers, saying the feature would no longer be enabled by default.
Last month, Microsoft debuted Copilot+ PCs, an AI-enabled version of Windows. Copilot+ ships with a feature nobody asked for that Redmond has aptly dubbed Recall, which constantly takes screenshots of what the user is doing on their PC. Security experts roundly trashed Recall as a fancy keylogger, noting that it would be a gold mine of information for attackers if the userβs PC was compromised with malware.
Microsoft countered that Recall snapshots never leave the userβs system, and that even if attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they would not be able to exfiltrate on-device Recall data. But that claim rang hollow after former Microsoft threat analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his blog how any user on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall data, which is just stored in an SQLite database locally.
βIβm not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade,β Beaumont said on Mastodon.
In a recent Risky Business podcast, host Patrick Gray noted that the screenshots created and indexed by Recall would be a boon to any attacker who suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar environment.
βThe first thing you want to do when you get on a machine if youβre up to no good is to figure out how someone did their job,β Gray said. βWe saw that in the case of the SWIFT attacks against central banks years ago. Attackers had to do screen recordings to figure out how transfers work. And this could speed up that sort of discovery process.β
Responding to the withering criticism of Recall, Microsoft said last week that it will no longer be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs.
Only one of the patches released today β CVE-2024-30080 β earned Microsoftβs most urgent βcriticalβ rating, meaning malware or malcontents could exploit the vulnerability to remotely seize control over a userβs system, without any user interaction.
CVE-2024-30080 is a flaw in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service that can allow attackers to execute code of their choosing. Microsoft says exploitation of this weakness is likely, enough to encourage users to disable the vulnerable component if updating isnβt possible in the short run. CVE-2024-30080 has been assigned a CVSS vulnerability score of 9.8 (10 is the worst).
Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said a saving grace is that MSMQ is not a default service on Windows.
βA Shodan search for MSMQ reveals there are a few thousand potentially internet-facing MSSQ servers that could be vulnerable to zero-day attacks if not patched quickly,β Breen said.
CVE-2024-30078 is a remote code execution weakness in the Windows WiFi Driver, which also has a CVSS score of 9.8. According to Microsoft, an unauthenticated attacker could exploit this bug by sending a malicious data packet to anyone else on the same network β meaning this flaw assumes the attacker has access to the local network.
Microsoft also fixed a number of serious security issues with its Office applications, including at least two remote-code execution flaws, said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.
βCVE-2024-30101 is a vulnerability in Outlook; although the Preview Pane is a vector, the user must subsequently perform unspecified specific actions to trigger the vulnerability and the attacker must win a race condition,β Barnett said. βCVE-2024-30104 does not have the Preview Pane as a vector, but nevertheless ends up with a slightly higher CVSS base score of 7.8, since exploitation relies solely on the user opening a malicious file.β
Separately, Adobe released security updates for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and Photoshop, among others.
As usual, the SANS Internet Storm Center has the skinny on the individual patches released today, indexed by severity, exploitability and urgency. Windows admins should also keep an eye on AskWoody.com, which often publishes early reports of any Windows patches gone awry.
Apple and Microsoft recently released software updates to fix dozens of security holes in their operating systems. Microsoft today patched at least 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows OS. Meanwhile, Appleβs new macOS Sonoma addresses at least 68 security weaknesses, and its latest update for iOS fixes two zero-day flaws.
Last week, Apple pushed out an urgent software update to its flagship iOS platform, warning that there were at least two zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities being used in the wild (CVE-2024-23225 and CVE-2024-23296). The security updates are available in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, and iOS 16.7.6.
Appleβs macOS Sonoma 14.4 Security Update addresses dozens of security issues. Jason Kitka, chief information security officer at Automox, said the vulnerabilities patched in this update often stem from memory safety issues, a concern that has led to a broader industry conversation about the adoption of memory-safe programming languages [full disclosure: Automox is an advertiser on this site].
On Feb. 26, 2024, the Biden administration issued a report that calls for greater adoption of memory-safe programming languages. On Mar. 4, 2024, Google published Secure by Design, which lays out the companyβs perspective on memory safety risks.
Mercifully, there do not appear to be any zero-day threats hounding Windows users this month (at least not yet). Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that of the 60 CVEs in this monthβs Patch Tuesday release, only six are considered βmore likely to be exploitedβ according to Microsoft.
Those more likely to be exploited bugs are mostly βelevation of privilege vulnerabilitiesβ including CVE-2024-26182 (Windows Kernel), CVE-2024-26170 (Windows Composite Image File System (CimFS), CVE-2024-21437 (Windows Graphics Component), and CVE-2024-21433 (Windows Print Spooler).
Narang highlighted CVE-2024-21390 as a particularly interesting vulnerability in this monthβs Patch Tuesday release, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in Microsoft Authenticator, the software giantβs app for multi-factor authentication. Narang said aΒ prerequisite for an attacker to exploit this flaw is to already have a presence on the device either through malware or a malicious application.
βIf a victim has closed and re-opened the Microsoft Authenticator app, an attacker could obtain multi-factor authentication codes and modify or delete accounts from the app,β Narang said. βHaving access to a target device is bad enough as they can monitor keystrokes, steal data and redirect users to phishing websites, but if the goal is to remain stealth, they could maintain this access and steal multi-factor authentication codes in order to login to sensitive accounts, steal data or hijack the accounts altogether by changing passwords and replacing the multi-factor authentication device, effectively locking the user out of their accounts.β
CVE-2024-21334 earned a CVSS (danger) score of 9.8 (10 is the worst), and it concerns a weakness in Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), a Linux-based cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft says attackers could connect to OMI instances over the Internet without authentication, and then send specially crafted data packets to gain remote code execution on the host device.
CVE-2024-21435 is a CVSS 8.8 vulnerability in Windows OLE, which acts as a kind of backbone for a great deal of communication between applications that people use every day on Windows, said Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineerΒ at Immersive Labs.
βWith this vulnerability, there is an exploit that allows remote code execution, the attacker needs to trick a user into opening a document, this document will exploit the OLE engine to download a malicious DLL to gain code execution on the system,β Breen explained. βThe attack complexity has been described as low meaning there is less of a barrier to entry for attackers.β
A full list of the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft this month is available at the SANS Internet Storm Center, which breaks down the updates by severity and urgency.
Finally, Adobe today issued security updates that fix dozens of security holes in a wide range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Premiere Pro, ColdFusion 2023 and 2021, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Adobe Animate. Adobe said it is not aware of active exploitation against any of the flaws.
By the way, Adobe recently enrolled all of its Acrobat users into a βnew generative AI featureβ that scans the contents of your PDFs so that its new βAI Assistantβ canΒ βunderstand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file.β Adobe provides instructions on how to disable the AI features and opt out here.
Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
Top of the heap on this Fat Patch Tuesday is CVE-2024-21412, a βsecurity feature bypassβ in the way Windows handles Internet Shortcut Files that Microsoft says is being targeted in active exploits. Redmondβs advisory for this bug says an attacker would need to convince or trick a user into opening a malicious shortcut file.
Researchers at Trend Micro have tied the ongoing exploitation of CVE-2024-21412 to an advanced persistent threat group dubbed βWater Hydra,β which they say has being using the vulnerability to execute a malicious Microsoft Installer File (.msi) that in turn unloads a remote access trojan (RAT) onto infected Windows systems.
The other zero-day flaw is CVE-2024-21351, another security feature bypass β this one in the built-in Windows SmartScreen component that tries to screen out potentially malicious files downloaded from the Web. Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs says itβs important to note that this vulnerability alone is not enough for an attacker to compromise a userβs workstation, and instead would likely be used in conjunction with something like a spear phishing attack that delivers a malicious file.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said this is the fifth vulnerability in Windows SmartScreen patched since 2022 and all five have been exploited in the wild as zero-days. They include CVE-2022-44698 in December 2022, CVE-2023-24880 in March 2023, CVE-2023-32049 in July 2023 and CVE-2023-36025 in November 2023.
Narang called special attention to CVE-2024-21410, an βelevation of privilegeβ bug in Microsoft Exchange Server that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited by attackers. Attacks on this flaw would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or βpass the hashβ attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.
βWe know that flaws that can disclose sensitive information like NTLM hashes are very valuable to attackers,β Narang said. βA Russian-based threat actor leveraged a similar vulnerability to carry out attacks β CVE-2023-23397 is an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook patched in March 2023.β
Microsoft notes that prior to its Exchange Server 2019 Cumulative Update 14 (CU14), a security feature called Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), which provides NTLM credential relay protections, was not enabled by default.
βGoing forward, CU14 enables this by default on Exchange servers, which is why it is important to upgrade,β Narang said.
Rapid7βs lead software engineer Adam Barnett highlighted CVE-2024-21413, a critical remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that could be exploited just by viewing a specially-crafted message in the Outlook Preview pane.
βMicrosoft Office typically shields users from a variety of attacks by opening files with Mark of the Web in Protected View, which means Office will render the document without fetching potentially malicious external resources,β Barnett said. βCVE-2024-21413 is a critical RCE vulnerability in Office which allows an attacker to cause a file to open in editing mode as though the user had agreed to trust the file.β
Barnett stressed that administrators responsible for Office 2016 installations who apply patches outside of Microsoft Update should note the advisory lists no fewer than five separate patches which must be installed to achieve remediation of CVE-2024-21413; individual update knowledge base (KB) articles further note that partially-patched Office installations will be blocked from starting until the correct combination of patches has been installed.
Itβs a good idea for Windows end-users to stay current with security updates from Microsoft, which can quickly pile up otherwise. That doesnβt mean you have to install them on Patch Tuesday. Indeed, waiting a day or three before updating is a sane response, given that sometimes updates go awry and usually within a few days Microsoft has fixed any issues with its patches. Itβs also smart to back up your data and/or image your Windows drive before applying new updates.
For a more detailed breakdown of the individual flaws addressed by Microsoft today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Centerβs list. For those admins responsible for maintaining larger Windows environments, it often pays to keep an eye on Askwoody.com, which frequently points out when specific Microsoft updates are creating problems for a number of users.