Qualys Blog

Today Microsoft released a fairly large batch of patches covering 81 vulnerabilities as part of September’s Patch Tuesday update, with 38 of them impacting Windows. Patches covering 27 of these vulnerabilities are labeled as Critical, and 39 can result in Remote Code Execution (RCE).  According to Microsoft, one critical vulnerability impacting HoloLens has a public exploit, and there are active malware campaigns exploiting a .NET vulnerability. Microsoft has also patched the BlueBorne vulnerability that could allow an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against a Windows system.

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Today Microsoft released patches covering 48 vulnerabilities as part of August’s Patch Tuesday update, with 15 of them affecting Windows. Patches covering 25 of these vulnerabilities are labeled as Critical, and 27 can result in Remote Code Execution. According to Microsoft, none of these vulnerabilities are currently being exploited in the wild.

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Today Microsoft released patches covering 54 vulnerabilities as part of July’s Patch Tuesday update, with 26 of them affecting Windows. Patches covering 19 of these vulnerabilities are labeled as Critical, all of which can result in Remote Code execution. According to Microsoft, none of these vulnerabilities are currently being exploited in the wild.

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Today Microsoft released patches to fix 94 vulnerabilities out of which 27 fix remote code execution issues which can allow an attackers to remotely take control of victim machines. This is a massive update and fixes more than double the number of vulnerabilities as compared to the last two months.

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Flash has been the top target for exploit kits and we have observed that defender behavior, i.e. how fast patches are applied along with other factors in the threat landscape could have led to a decline in the number of Flash vulnerabilities being weaponized in exploit kits.  In 2016, the time to patch 80% of Flash vulnerabilities reduced by more than half to 62 days as compared to the previous year when it was 144 days. This data is based on more than 3 billion scans performed by Qualys and could be one of the contributing factors why Flash-based attack integration in exploit kits is declining. If organizations patch quickly it gives less time for exploit kits to integrate the exploits and the chances of phishing vulnerable users reduce greatly if more machines are patched quickly.

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Hours before today’s Patch Tuesday release on the eve of May 8, Microsoft released an emergency updated to fix a vulnerability in their Malware Protection Engine. This critical vulnerability allows an attacker to take complete control of the victim’s machine by just sending an e-mail attachment. When the malware protection engine scans the attachment the malicious code in the file gets executed, allowing the attacker complete and full access to the computer. The attack can also be carried out by sending the file via an instant message or having the victim download the file from a website. It is absolutely essential that organizations using Microsoft Malware Protection Engine make sure that they are at version Version 1.1.13704.0 or later. Users should also check if they are patched for CVE-2017-0290, which was released for the same issue today.

In today’s Patch Tuesday update Microsoft released a total of 57 vulnerability fixes. Highest priority should go to patching 0-day issues which are actively exploited.  On top of our list is the Office patch for CVE-2017-0261 which is triggered when a victim opens an Office file containing a malformed graphics image.  The file could be delivered via email or any other means. As this is actively exploited in the wild and attackers can take complete control of the victim system, this should be treated with priority.

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IBM has released a patch for Lotus Domino to plug a security flaw which was disclosed in the latest Shadow Broker revelations. Lotus Domino includes an IMAP server. IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol is an Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail messages from the mail server over a TCP/IP connection. The server contains a stack buffer overflow in the handling of mailbox names. This vulnerability affects Domino server 9.0.1FP8 and earlier versions, and this exploit has been referred to by the “EMPHASISMINE” code name by Shadow Brokers. CVE-2017-1274 has been assigned to this issue.

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Today Oracle released a total of 299 new security fixes across all product families. It is important to note that it fixed 25 instances of the infamous Apache Struts vulnerability which could allow a remote attacker to take complete control of the server running Struts. The struts fix was applied to 19 instances of Oracle Financial Services Applications along with WebCenter, WebLogic, Siebel, Oracle Communications, MySQL and Oracle Retail.

Oracle also released Patch 25878798 for Solaris 10 and 11.3 which fixed the second Shadow Brokers EXTREMEPARR vulnerability CVE-2017-3622. EXTREMEPARR  has a CVSS Base Score of 7.8, and if successfully exploited allows a local privilege escalation in the ‘dtappgather’ component. The other Shadow Brokers vulnerability CVE-2017-3623 (a.k.a. “Ebbisland” or “Ebbshave”) was previously addressed by Oracle in several Solaris 10 patch distributions issued since January 26^th 2012 and does not affect Solaris 11.

Out of the 299 total fixes MySQL, Financial Services, Retail and Fusion Middleware take the lion’s share of fixes and the distribution is shown in the chart below. Majority of the vulnerabilities in the Financial Services, Retail and Fusion Middleware could be exploited via the HTTP protocol and attackers can take complete control of the system remotely without the need of any credentials.

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Microsoft Fixes 45 Vulnerabilities with new Security Update Guide and says goodbye to Security Bulletins. Adobe Fixes Flash, PDF reader and Photoshop.

Today is the first month since 1998 in which Microsoft stopped releasing security bulletins with the familiar MSxx-xxx format and replaced it with the new security update guide. We talked about this change earlier in a few blog posts and finally today it’s time to say good bye to security bulletins which essentially combined related vulnerabilities and products for easy of consumption.

In today’s release Microsoft fixed a total of 45 vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution, denial-of-service, elevation of privileges, security feature bypass and spoofing. Top priority goes to the Office and WordPad CVE-2017-0199 which fixed a 0-day vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild. Exploitation of this vulnerability requires that a user open or preview a specially crafted file with an affected version of Office or WordPad. Attacker could accomplish this by sending a specially crafted file to the user and then convincing the user to open the file. We recommend administrators patch this as soon as possible.

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