Microsoft Issues Patches for 2 Windows Zero-Days and 126 Other Vulnerabilities

Apr 13, 2022Ravie Lakshmanan

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates for the month of April have addressed a total of 128 security vulnerabilities spanning across its software product portfolio, including Windows, Defender, Office, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, and Print Spooler, among others.

10 of the 128 bugs fixed are rated Critical, 115 are rated Important, and three are rated Moderate in severity, with one of the flaws listed as publicly known and another under active attack at the time of the release.

The updates are in addition to 26 other flaws resolved by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the start of the month.

The actively exploited flaw (CVE-2022-24521, CVSS score: 7.8) relates to an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS). Credited with reporting the flaw are the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and CrowdStrike researchers Adam Podlosky and Amir Bazine.

The second publicly-known zero-day flaw (CVE-2022-26904, CVSS score: 7.0) also concerns a case of privilege escalation in the Windows User Profile Service, successful exploitation of which "requires an attacker to win a race condition."

Other critical flaws to note include a number of remote code execution flaws in RPC Runtime Library (CVE-2022-26809, CVSS score: 9.8), Windows Network File System (CVE-2022-24491 and CVE-2022-24497, CVSS scores: 9.8), Windows Server Service (CVE-2022-24541), Windows SMB (CVE-2022-24500), and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CVE-2022-23259).

Microsoft also patched as many as 18 flaws in Windows DNS Server, one information disclosure flaw and 17 remote code execution flaws, all of which were reported by security researcher Yuki Chen. Also remediated are 15 privilege escalation flaws in the Windows Print Spooler component.

The patches arrive a week after the tech giant announced plans to make available a feature called AutoPatch in July 2022 that allows enterprises to expedite applying security fixes in a timely fashion while emphasizing on scalability and stability.