Critical Zero-Days in Atera Windows Installers Expose Users to Privilege Escalation Attacks

Zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows Installers for the Atera distant checking and administration application could act as a springboard to launch privilege escalation attacks.

The flaws, learned by Mandiant on February 28, 2023, have been assigned the identifiers CVE-2023-26077 and CVE-2023-26078, with the issues remediated in variations 1.8.3.7 and 1.8.4.9 produced by Atera on April 17, 2023, and June 26, 2023, respectively.

“The skill to initiate an procedure from a NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM context can current likely security hazards if not effectively managed,” security researcher Andrew Oliveau explained. “For occasion, misconfigured Customized Actions running as NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM can be exploited by attackers to execute neighborhood privilege escalation attacks.”

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Successful exploitation of such weaknesses could pave the way for the execution of arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

Each the flaws reside in the MSI installer’s fix operation, likely producing a circumstance in which operations are induced from an NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM context even if they are initiated by a regular consumer.

According to the Google-owned risk intelligence agency, Atera Agent is inclined to a regional privilege escalation attack that can be exploited as a result of DLL hijacking (CVE-2023-26077), which could then be abused to receive a Command Prompt as the NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM person.

CVE-2023-26078, on the other hand, issues the “execution of program commands that induce the Windows Console Host (conhost.exe) as a kid method,” as a end result opening up a “command window, which, if executed with elevated privileges, can be exploited by an attacker to carry out a nearby privilege escalation attack.”

“Misconfigured Tailor made Actions can be trivial to recognize and exploit, therefore posing important security risks for organizations,” Oliveau reported. “It is vital for software package developers to completely assessment their Custom made Actions to stop attackers from hijacking NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM operations induced by MSI repairs.”

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The disclosure comes as Kaspersky shed additional gentle on a now-fastened, significant privilege escalation flaw in Windows (CVE-2023-23397, CVSS rating: 9.8) that has arrive under energetic exploitation in the wild by risk actors employing a specifically crafted Outlook activity, information or calendar celebration.

When Microsoft disclosed previously that Russian country-condition groups weaponized the bug considering that April 2022, evidence collected by the antivirus vendor has uncovered that actual-planet exploit attempts had been carried out by an not known attacker focusing on governing administration and critical infrastructure entities in Jordan, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine a thirty day period prior to the public disclosure.

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