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 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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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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Today Microsoft released a massive Patch Tuesday security update consisting of 17 security bulletins that fixed a total of 134 vulnerabilities.  Out of the 17 security bulletins 8 were marked as Critical which could lead to remote code execution while the remaining were marked as Important. Since there were no patches released for February, in one way, a massive update was expected this month. We also liked the fact that Microsoft kept the older way of clubbing KB articles and patches in security bulletins which, in our opinion, is easy to read and provides better overall picture. But the Microsoft blog here, allude that sometime in the future Microsoft will stop publishing security bulletins.

The highest priority overall goes to the Windows GDI bulletin MS17-013 which could allow remote code execution if a user either visits a specially crafted website or opens a specially crafted document. This gets highest priority as CVE-2017-0005 is a zero day issue which is currently being exploited actively in the wild. This issue could be incorporated soon by ExploitKits using Silverlight as the attack vector as we have seen that happen in the past.

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UPDATE: Microsoft has announced that all updates will be delivered in the March 14 patch cycle.

As covered in our January blog, today Microsoft was supposed to scrap the existing system in which users used to get a bulletin like MS17-001 in favor of a new ‘single destination for security vulnerability information’ called the Security Updates Guide. But as per Microsoft’s blog, February’s Patch Tuesday has been delayed as Microsoft discovered a last minute issue that could impact some customers and could not resolve it in time for the planned update. This comes on the heels of the announcement that individual patches will not be available as they will be bundled together in the monthly Security update or monthly Cumulative update. If there is a problem in the patch for one kernel vulnerability for example, then all kernel or related vulnerabilities cannot be released as they are bundled together. A zero day SMB vulnerability was expected to be patched today and as of this writing there is no official statement on the new release date.

On the Adobe front, three security updated were released and the most important one is for Flash APSB17-04 which affects Windows, Mac, Linux and ChromeOS. If left un-patched this allows attackers to take complete control of the system. An attacker would host malicious flash content and the vulnerability will trigger when victim views the content.

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Oracle kicked off the New Year with its first installment of the quarterly CPU (critical patch update) for 2017. The update contains fix for 270 security issues across wide range of products. The graph below shows distribution of the update. More than 100 vulnerabilities that were fixed could be compromised by a remote attacker without requiring any credentials. Most remote vulnerabilities could be exploited over the HTTP protocol.

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