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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging federal agencies to secure their systems against an actively exploited security vulnerability in Windows that could be abused to gain elevated permissions on affected hosts. To that end, the agency has added  CVE-2022-21882  (CVSS score: 7.0) to the  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , necessitating that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies patch all systems against this vulnerability by February 18, 2022. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," CISA  said  in an advisory published last week. CVE-2022-21882 , which has been tagged with an "Exploitation More Likely" exploitability index assessment, concerns a case of elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting the Win32k component. The bug was addressed by Microsoft as part of its January 2022  Patch Tu

Microsoft on Tuesday kicked off its first set of updates for 2022 by  plugging 96 security holes  across its software ecosystem, while urging customers to prioritize patching for what it calls a critical "wormable" vulnerability. Of the 96 vulnerabilities, nine are rated Critical and 89 are rated Important in severity, with six zero-day publicly known at the time of the release. This is in addition to  29 issues  patched in Microsoft Edge on January 6, 2022. None of the disclosed bugs are listed as under attack. The patches cover a swath of the computing giant's portfolio, including Microsoft Windows and Windows Components, Exchange Server, Microsoft Office and Office Components, SharePoint Server, .NET Framework, Microsoft Dynamics, Open-Source Software, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Defender, and Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Chief among them is  CVE-2022-21907  (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution vulnerability rooted in the HTTP Protocol Stack. "In

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Microsoft on Thursday officially confirmed that the " PrintNightmare " remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler is different from the issue the company addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update released earlier this month, while warning that it has detected exploitation attempts targeting the flaw. The company is tracking the security weakness under the identifier  CVE-2021-34527 , and has assigned it a severity rating of 8.8 on the CVSS scoring system. All versions of Windows contain the vulnerable code and are susceptible to exploitation. "A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations," Microsoft said in its advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user righ

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit related to a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler and patched by Microsoft earlier this month was briefly published online before being taken down. Identified as  CVE-2021-1675 , the security issue could grant remote attackers full control of vulnerable systems.  Print Spooler  manages the printing process in Windows, including loading the appropriate printer drivers and scheduling the print job for printing, among others. Print Spooler flaws are concerning, not least because of the wide attack surface, but also owing to the fact that it runs at the highest privilege level and is capable of dynamically loading third-party binaries. The Windows maker addressed the vulnerability as part of its Patch Tuesday update on June 8, 2021. But almost two weeks later, Microsoft revised the flaw's impact from an elevation of privilege to remote code execution (RCE) as well as upgraded the severity level from Important to Crit

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack —wherein a client system vulnerable to a path traversal vulnerability could get compromised when remotely accessing a server over Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol? Though Microsoft had patched the vulnerability (CVE-2019-0887) as part of its July 2019 Patch Tuesday update, it turns out researchers were able to bypass the patch just by replacing the backward slashes in paths with forward slashes. Microsoft acknowledged the improper fix and re-patched the flaw in its February 2020 Patch Tuesday update earlier this year, now tracked as CVE-2020-0655. In the latest report shared with The Hacker News, Check Point researcher disclosed that Microsoft addressed the issue by adding a separate workaround in Windows while leaving the root of the bypass issue, an API function "PathCchCanonicalize," unchanged. Apparently, the workaround works fine for the built-in RDP client in Windows operating systems, but the patch is not fool-proof en

Microsoft today issued a new security advisory warning billions of Windows users of two new critical, unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities that could let hackers remotely take complete control over targeted computers. According to Microsoft , both unpatched flaws are being used in limited, targeted attacks and impact all supported versions of the Windows operating system—including Windows 10, 8.1 and Server 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2019 editions, as well as Windows 7 for which Microsoft ended its support on January 14, 2020. Both vulnerabilities reside in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library , a font parsing software that not only parses content when open with a 3rd-party software but also used by Windows Explorer to display the content of a file in the 'Preview Pane' or 'Details Pane' without having users to open it. The flaws exist in Microsoft Windows when the Adobe Type Manager Library improperly "handles a specially-crafted multi-master font - Adobe Type

Update — With this month's patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has finally addressed this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1162 , by correcting how the Windows operating system handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). A Google security researcher has just disclosed details of a 20-year-old unpatched high-severity vulnerability affecting all versions of Microsoft Windows, back from Windows XP to the latest Windows 10. The vulnerability resides in the way MSCTF clients and server communicate with each other, allowing even a low privileged or a sandboxed application to read and write data to a higher privileged application. MSCTF is a module in Text Services Framework (TSF) of the Windows operating system that manages things like input methods, keyboard layouts, text processing, and speech recognition. In a nutshell, when you log in to your Windows machine, it starts a CTF monitor service that works as a central manager to handle communications between all c

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of WatchBog , a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining malware botnet, which now also includes a module to scan the Internet for Windows RDP servers vulnerable to the Bluekeep flaw . BlueKeep is a highly-critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Services that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol. Though the patches for the BlueKeep vulnerability (CVE–2019-0708) was already released by Microsoft in May this year, more than 800,000 Windows machines accessible over the Internet are still vulnerable to the critical flaw. Fortunately, even after many individuals in the security community developed working remote code exploits for BlueKeep, there is no public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit available till the date, potentially preventing opportunistic hackers from wreaking h

Microsoft today released its monthly batch of software security updates for the July month to patch a total of 77 vulnerabilities, 14 are rated Critical, 62 are Important, and 1 is rated Moderate in severity. The July 2019 security updates include patches for various supported versions of Windows operating systems and other Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Azure DevOps, Open Source Software, .NET Framework, Azure, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and Exchange Server. Details of 6 security vulnerabilities, all rated important, were made public before a patch was released, none of which were found being exploited in the wild. However, two new privilege escalation vulnerabilities, one affects all supported versions of the Windows operating system, and the other affects Windows 7 and Server 2008, have been reported as being actively exploited in the wild. Both actively exploited vulnerabilities lead to elevation of privilege, one (CVE-2019-1132)

After Adobe , the technology giant Microsoft today—on June 2019 Patch Tuesday—also released its monthly batch of software security updates for various supported versions of Windows operating systems and other Microsoft products. This month's security updates include patches for a total of 88 vulnerabilities, 21 are rated Critical, 66 are Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. The June 2019 updates include patches Windows OS, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft Office and Services, ChakraCore, Skype for Business, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Azure. Four of the security vulnerabilities, all rated important and could allow attackers to escalate privileges, patched by the tech giant this month were disclosed publicly, of which none were found exploited in the wild. Unpatched Issue Reported by Google Researcher However, Microsoft failed to patch a minor flaw in SymCrypt , a core cryptographic function library currently used by

Less than 24 hours after publicly disclosing an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Windows 10 , the anonymous hacker going by online alias "SandboxEscaper" has now dropped new exploits for two more unpatched Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities. The two new zero-day vulnerabilities affect Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting service and Internet Explorer 11. Just yesterday, while releasing a Windows 10 zero-day exploit for a local privilege escalation bug in Task Scheduler utility, SandboxEscaper claimed to have discovered four more zero-day bugs, exploits for two has now been publicly released. AngryPolarBearBug2 Windows Bug One of the latest Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities resides in the Windows Error Reporting service that can be exploited using a discretionary access control list (DACL) operation—a mechanism that identifies users and groups that are assigned or denied access permissions to a securable object. Upon successful exploitation, an attacker can del

In a shocking revelation, it turns out that a hacking group believed to be sponsored by Chinese intelligence had been using some of the zero-day exploits linked to the NSA's Equation Group almost a year before the mysterious Shadow Brokers group leaked them. According to a new report published by cybersecurity firm Symantec, a Chinese-linked group, which it calls Buckeye , was using the NSA-linked hacking tools as far back as March 2016, while the Shadow Brokers dumped some of the tools on the Internet in April 2017. Active since at least 2009, Buckeye—also known as APT3, Gothic Panda, UPS Team, and TG-0110—is responsible for a large number of espionage attacks, mainly against defence and critical organizations in the United States. Although Symantec did not explicitly name China in its report, researchers with a high degree of confidence have previously attributed [ 1 , 2 ] Buckeye hacking group to an information security company, called Boyusec, who is working on beh

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered and reported in the Microsoft's Windows operating system that, under a certain scenario, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on Windows machine. Discovered by security researcher John Page (@hyp3rlinx), the vulnerability was reported to the Microsoft security team through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Program over 6 months ago, which the tech giant has refused to patch, at least for now. The vulnerability, which has not been assigned any CVE number, actually resides within the processing of a vCard file—a standard file format for storing contact information for a person or business, which is also supported by Microsoft Outlook. According to the researcher, a remote attacker can maliciously craft a VCard file in a way that the contact's website URL stored within the file points to a local executable file, which can be sent within a zipped file via an email or delivered separately via drive-b

A security researcher with Twitter alias SandboxEscaper—who two months ago publicly dropped a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler—has yesterday released another proof-of-concept exploit for a new Windows zero-day vulnerability. SandboxEscaper posted a link to a Github page hosting a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the vulnerability that appears to be a privilege escalation flaw residing in Microsoft Data Sharing (dssvc.dll). The Data Sharing Service is a local service that runs as LocalSystem account with extensive privileges and provides data brokering between applications. The flaw could allow a low-privileged attacker to elevate their privileges on a target system, though the PoC exploit code (deletebug.exe) released by the researcher only allows a low privileged user to delete critical system files—that otherwise would only be possible via admin level privileges. "Not the same bug I posted a while back, this doesn't write garbage to files

Microsoft has just released its latest monthly Patch Tuesday updates for October 2018, fixing a total of 49 security vulnerabilities in its products. This month's security updates address security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Edge Browser, Internet Explorer, MS Office, MS Office Services and Web Apps, ChakraCore, SQL Server Management Studio, and Exchange Server. Out of 49 flaws patched this month, 12 are rated as critical, 35 are rated as important, one moderate, and one is low in severity. Three of these vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant are listed as "publicly known" at the time of release, and one flaw is reported as being actively exploited in the wild. Windows Update Patches An Important Flaw Under Active Attack According to the Microsoft advisory , an undisclosed group of attackers is actively exploiting an important elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE-2018-8453) in Microsoft Windows operating system to take full control over the targete

A security researcher has publicly disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Microsoft Windows operating system (including server editions) after the company failed to patch a responsibly disclosed bug within the 120-days deadline. Discovered by Lucas Leong of the Trend Micro Security Research team, the zero-day vulnerability resides in Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could allow an attacker to remotely execute malicious code on any vulnerable Windows computer. The Microsoft JET Database Engine, or simply JET (Joint Engine Technology), is a database engine integrated within several Microsoft products, including Microsoft Access and Visual Basic. According to the an  advisory  released by Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the vulnerability is due to a problem with the management of indexes in the Jet database engine that, if exploited successfully, can cause an out-out-bounds memory write, leading to remote code execution. An attacker must convi

Meltdown CPU vulnerability was bad, and Microsoft somehow made the flaw even worse on its Windows 7, allowing any unprivileged, user-level application to read content from and even write data to the operating system's kernel memory. For those unaware, Spectre and Meltdown were security flaws disclosed by researchers earlier this year in processors from Intel, ARM, and AMD, leaving nearly every PC, server, and mobile phone on the planet vulnerable to data theft. Shortly after the researchers disclosed the Spectre and Meltdown exploits , software vendors, including Microsoft, started releasing patches for their systems running a vulnerable version of processors. However, an independent Swedish security researcher Ulf Frisk found that Microsoft's security fixes to Windows 7 PCs for the Meltdown flaw—which could allow attackers to read kernel memory at a speed of 120 KBps—is now allowing attackers to read the same kernel memory at a speed of Gbps, making the issue even wo