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If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently — like total solar eclipse rare — instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this month’s patch batch — a record 147 flaws in Windows and related software.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft today released updates to address 147 security holes in Windows, Office, Azure, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server, DNS Server, Windows Defender, Bitlocker, and Windows Secure Boot.
“This is the largest release from Microsoft this year and the largest since at least 2017,” said Dustin Childs, from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). “As far as I can tell, it’s the largest Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft of all time.”
Tempering the sheer volume of this month’s patches is the middling severity of many of the bugs. Only three of April’s vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be abused by malware or malcontents to take remote control over unpatched systems with no help from users.
Most of the flaws that Microsoft deems “more likely to be exploited” this month are marked as “important,” which usually involve bugs that require a bit more user interaction (social engineering) but which nevertheless can result in system security bypass, compromise, and the theft of critical assets.
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs called attention to CVE-2024-20670, an Outlook for Windows spoofing vulnerability described as being easy to exploit. It involves convincing a user to click on a malicious link in an email, which can then steal the user’s password hash and authenticate as the user in another Microsoft service.
Another interesting bug McCarthy pointed to is CVE-2024-29063, which involves hard-coded credentials in Azure’s search backend infrastructure that could be gleaned by taking advantage of Azure AI search.
“This along with many other AI attacks in recent news shows a potential new attack surface that we are just learning how to mitigate against,” McCarthy said. “Microsoft has updated their backend and notified any customers who have been affected by the credential leakage.”
CVE-2024-29988 is a weakness that allows attackers to bypass Windows SmartScreen, a technology Microsoft designed to provide additional protections for end users against phishing and malware attacks. Childs said one of ZDI’s researchers found this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, although Microsoft doesn’t currently list CVE-2024-29988 as being exploited.
“I would treat this as in the wild until Microsoft clarifies,” Childs said. “The bug itself acts much like CVE-2024-21412 – a [zero-day threat from February] that bypassed the Mark of the Web feature and allows malware to execute on a target system. Threat actors are sending exploits in a zipped file to evade EDR/NDR detection and then using this bug (and others) to bypass Mark of the Web.”
Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story said there were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month. BleepingComputer reports that Microsoft has since confirmed that there are actually two zero-days. One is the flaw Childs just mentioned (CVE-2024-21412), and the other is CVE-2024-26234, described as a “proxy driver spoofing” weakness.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that this month’s release includes fixes for two dozen flaws in Windows Secure Boot, the majority of which are considered “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft.
“However, the last time Microsoft patched a flaw in Windows Secure Boot in May 2023 had a notable impact as it was exploited in the wild and linked to the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which was sold on dark web forums for $5,000,” Narang said. “BlackLotus can bypass functionality called secure boot, which is designed to block malware from being able to load when booting up. While none of these Secure Boot vulnerabilities addressed this month were exploited in the wild, they serve as a reminder that flaws in Secure Boot persist, and we could see more malicious activity related to Secure Boot in the future.”
For links to individual security advisories indexed by severity, check out ZDI’s blog and the Patch Tuesday post from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Please consider backing up your data or your drive before updating, and drop a note in the comments here if you experience any issues applying these fixes.
Adobe today released nine patches tackling at least two dozen vulnerabilities in a range of software products, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Commerce, InDesign, Experience Manager, Media Encoder, Bridge, Illustrator, and Adobe Animate.
KrebsOnSecurity needs to correct the record on a point mentioned at the end of March’s “Fat Patch Tuesday” post, which looked at new AI capabilities built into Adobe Acrobat that are turned on by default. Adobe has since clarified that its apps won’t use AI to auto-scan your documents, as the original language in its FAQ suggested.
“In practice, no document scanning or analysis occurs unless a user actively engages with the AI features by agreeing to the terms, opening a document, and selecting the AI Assistant or generative summary buttons for that specific document,” Adobe said earlier this month.
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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, Apple’s 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.
Apple’s 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 company’s 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 month’s Patch Tuesday release, only six are considered “more likely to be exploited” according to Microsoft.
Those more likely to be exploited bugs are mostly “elevation of privilege vulnerabilities” 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 month’s Patch Tuesday release, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in Microsoft Authenticator, the software giant’s app for multi-factor authentication. Narang said a prerequisite for an attacker to exploit this flaw is to already have a presence on the device either through malware or a malicious application.
“If 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,” Narang said. “Having 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.”
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 engineer at Immersive Labs.
“With 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,” Breen explained. “The attack complexity has been described as low meaning there is less of a barrier to entry for attackers.”
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 “new generative AI feature” that scans the contents of your PDFs so that its new “AI Assistant” can “understand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file.” Adobe provides instructions on how to disable the AI features and opt out here.
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Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do.
On Sept. 7, researchers at Citizen Lab warned they were seeing active exploitation of a “zero-click,” zero-day flaw to install spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim.
“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” the researchers wrote.
According to Citizen Lab, the exploit uses malicious images sent via iMessage, an embedded component of Apple’s iOS that has been the source of previous zero-click flaws in iPhones and iPads.
Apple says the iOS flaw (CVE-2023-41064) does not seem to work against devices that have its ultra-paranoid “Lockdown Mode” enabled. This feature restricts non-essential iOS features to reduce the device’s overall attack surface, and it was designed for users concerned that they may be subject to targeted attacks. Citizen Lab says the bug it discovered was being exploited to install spyware made by the Israeli cyber surveillance company NSO Group.
This vulnerability is fixed in iOS 16.6.1 and iPadOS 16.6.1. To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode.
Not to be left out of the zero-day fun, Google acknowledged on Sept. 11 that an exploit for a heap overflow bug in Chrome is being exploited in the wild. Google says it is releasing updates to fix the flaw, and that restarting Chrome is the way to apply any pending updates. Interestingly, Google says this bug was reported by Apple and Citizen Lab.
On the Microsoft front, a zero-day in Microsoft Word is among the more concerning bugs fixed today. Tracked as CVE-2023-36761, it is flagged as an “information disclosure” vulnerability. But that description hardly grasps at the sensitivity of the information potentially exposed here.
Tom Bowyer, manager of product security at Automox, said exploiting this vulnerability could lead to the disclosure of Net-NTLMv2 hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.
“If a malicious actor gains access to these hashes, they can potentially impersonate the user, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems,” Bowyer said, noting that CVE-2023-36761 can be exploited just by viewing a malicious document in the Windows preview pane. “They could also conduct pass-the-hash attacks, where the attacker uses the hashed version of a password to authenticate themselves without needing to decrypt it.”
The other Windows zero-day fixed this month is CVE-2023-36802. This is an “elevation of privilege” flaw in the “Microsoft Streaming Service Proxy,” which is built into Windows 10, 11 and Windows Server versions. Microsoft says an attacker who successfully exploits the bug can gain SYSTEM level privileges on a Windows computer.
Five of the flaws Microsoft fixed this month earned its “critical” rating, which the software giant reserves for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or malcontents with little or no interaction by Windows users.
According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, the most serious critical bug in September’s Patch Tuesday is CVE-2023-38148, which is a weakness in the Internet Connection Sharing service on Windows. Microsoft says an unauthenticated attacker could leverage the flaw to install malware just sending a specially crafted data packet to a vulnerable Windows system.
Finally, Adobe has released critical security updates for its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that also fixes a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-26369). More details are at Adobe’s advisory.
For a more granular breakdown of the Windows updates pushed out today, check out Microsoft Patch Tuesday by Morphus Labs. In the meantime, consider backing up your data before updating Windows, and keep an eye on AskWoody.com for reports of any widespread problems with any of the updates released as part of September’s Patch Tuesday.
Update: Mozilla also has fixed zero-day flaw in Firefox and Thunderbird, and the Brave browser was updated as well. It appears the common theme here is any software that uses a code library called “libwebp,” and that this vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-4863.
“This includes Electron-based applications, for example – Signal,” writes StackDiary.com. “Electron patched the vulnerability yesterday. Also, software like Honeyview (from Bandisoft) released an update to fix the issue. CVE-2023-4863 was falsely marked as Chrome-only by Mitre and other organizations that track CVE’s and 100% of media reported this issue as “Chrome only”, when it’s not.”
Microsoft Corp. today issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild.
Six of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants could use them to install software on a vulnerable Windows system without any help from users.
Last month, Microsoft acknowledged a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in a variety of Microsoft products that were discovered and exploited in-the-wild attacks. They were assigned a single placeholder designation of CVE-2023-36884.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said the August patch batch addresses CVE-2023-36884, which involves bypassing the Windows Search Security feature.
“Microsoft also released ADV230003, a defense-in-depth update designed to stop the attack chain associated that leads to the exploitation of this CVE,” Narang said. “Given that this has already been successfully exploited in the wild as a zero-day, organizations should prioritize patching this vulnerability and applying the defense-in-depth update as soon as possible.”
Redmond patched another flaw that is already seeing active attacks — CVE-2023-38180 — a weakness in .NET and Visual Studio that leads to a denial-of-service condition on vulnerable servers.
“Although the attacker would need to be on the same network as the target system, this vulnerability does not require the attacker to have acquired user privileges,” on the target system, wrote Nikolas Cemerikic, cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs.
Narang said the software giant also patched six vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, including CVE-2023-21709, an elevation of privilege flaw that was assigned a CVSSv3 (threat) score of 9.8 out of a possible 10, even though Microsoft rates it as an important flaw, not critical.
“An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by conducting a brute-force attack against valid user accounts,” Narang said. “Despite the high rating, the belief is that brute-force attacks won’t be successful against accounts with strong passwords. However, if weak passwords are in use, this would make brute-force attempts more successful. The remaining five vulnerabilities range from a spoofing flaw and multiple remote code execution bugs, though the most severe of the bunch also require credentials for a valid account.”
Experts at security firm Automox called attention to CVE-2023-36910, a remote code execution bug in the Microsoft Message Queuing service that can be exploited remotely and without privileges to execute code on vulnerable Windows 10, 11 and Server 2008-2022 systems. Microsoft says it considers this vulnerability “less likely” to be exploited, and Automox says while the message queuing service is not enabled by default in Windows and is less common today, any device with it enabled is at critical risk.
Separately, Adobe has issued a critical security update for Acrobat and Reader that resolves at least 30 security vulnerabilities in those products. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild targeting these flaws. The company also issued security updates for Adobe Commerce and Adobe Dimension.
If you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a fair chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with useful tips.
Additional reading:
-SANS Internet Storm Center listing of each Microsoft vulnerability patched today, indexed by severity and affected component.
–AskWoody.com, which keeps tabs on any developing problems related to the availability or installation of these updates.
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 74 separate security problems in its Windows operating systems and related software. This month’s patch batch includes fixes for seven “critical” flaws, as well as a zero-day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows.
By all accounts, the most urgent bug Microsoft addressed this month is CVE-2022-26925, a weakness in a central component of Windows security (the “Local Security Authority” process within Windows). CVE-2022-26925 was publicly disclosed prior to today, and Microsoft says it is now actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw affects Windows 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2022.
Greg Wiseman, product manager for Rapid7, said Microsoft has rated this vulnerability as important and assigned it a CVSS (danger) score of 8.1 (10 being the worst), although Microsoft notes that the CVSS score can be as high as 9.8 in certain situations.
“This allows attackers to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to force domain controllers to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM authentication,” Wiseman said. “This is very bad news when used in conjunction with an NTLM relay attack, potentially leading to remote code execution. This bug affects all supported versions of Windows, but Domain Controllers should be patched on a priority basis before updating other servers.”
Wiseman said the most recent time Microsoft patched a similar vulnerability — last August in CVE-2021-36942 — it was also being exploited in the wild under the name “PetitPotam.”
“CVE-2021-36942 was so bad it made CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities,” Wiseman said.
Seven of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, which it assigns to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to remotely compromise a vulnerable Windows system without any help from the user.
Among those is CVE-2022-26937, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and affects services using the Windows Network File System (NFS). Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that this bug could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code in the context of the Network File System (NFS) service on affected systems.
“NFS isn’t on by default, but it’s prevalent in environment where Windows systems are mixed with other OSes such as Linux or Unix,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “If this describes your environment, you should definitely test and deploy this patch quickly.”
Once again, this month’s Patch Tuesday is sponsored by Windows Print Spooler, a core Windows service that keeps spooling out the security hits. May’s patches include four fixes for Print Spooler, including two information disclosure and two elevation of privilege flaws.
“All of the flaws are rated as important, and two of the three are considered more likely to be exploited,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “Windows Print Spooler continues to remain a valuable target for attackers since PrintNightmare was disclosed nearly a year ago. Elevation of Privilege flaws in particular should be carefully prioritized, as we’ve seen ransomware groups like Conti favor them as part of its playbook.”
Other Windows components that received patches this month include .NET and Visual Studio, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Authentication Methods, BitLocker, Remote Desktop Client, and Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.
Also today, Adobe issued five security bulletins to address at least 18 flaws in Adobe CloudFusion, Framemaker, InCopy, InDesign, and Adobe Character Animator. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in today’s updates.
For a more granular look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
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