Pictured: the Mountain View, California regional headquarters of Microsoft, which just patched 120 application vulnerabilities for Patch Tuesday. (Smith Assortment/Gado/Getty Visuals)
With its most current routinely scheduled security update, Microsoft has fixed 120 software program vulnerabilities, which include 17 critical flaws, 1 of which is a zero-working day bug that has been actively exploited in the wild.
Microsoft this year has previously eclipsed the full variety of patches it issued through all of 2019 — a rate that specialists at Trend Micro’s Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) says provides a patching management obstacle for organizations.

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“This provides the complete amount of Microsoft patches released this calendar year to 862 – 11 a lot more patches than Microsoft shipped in all of 2019,” claimed ZDI in a blog site post today. “If they preserve this speed, it is rather achievable for them to ship far more than 1,300 patches this 12 months. This quantity – together with complicated servicing situations – places further force on patch management teams.”
The 1st zero-working day is CVE-2020-1380, a memory corruption vulnerability that can result in distant code execution when the scripting engine mishandles objects in memory in Internet Explorer. Attackers can exploit this bug to achieve the very same user legal rights as the current user, which could lead to a devices takeover letting for the installation of courses, the manipulation details or the generation of privileged accounts, if the consumer has administrative privileges.
“In a web-centered attack situation, an attacker could host a specifically crafted website that is made to exploit the vulnerability via Internet Explorer and then convince a person to view the site,” Microsoft describes in its security update. “An attacker could also embed an ActiveX manage marked ‘safe for initialization’ in an application or Microsoft Office doc that hosts the IE rendering engine. The attacker could also take benefit of compromised internet websites and internet sites that acknowledge or host consumer-supplied information or advertisements. These sites could incorporate specially crafted material that could exploit the vulnerability.”
Kaspersky reported the flaw just after investigating an tried assault in opposition to a South Korean company — an attack the company characteristics with medium assurance to suspected South Korean APT team DarkHotel. In accordance to Kaspersky, the remote code execution attempt concerned a two-phase exploit chain using both of those CVE-2020-1380 and a privilege escalation in the Windows printer service that was patched last June.
“When in the wild attacks with zero-day vulnerabilities take place, it is generally big news for the cybersecurity neighborhood,” said Boris Larin, the security pro at Kaspersky who is particularly credited for the bug discover. “Successful detection of these kinds of a vulnerability quickly pressures sellers to issue a patch and forces consumers to install all vital updates.”
“What is significantly fascinating in the discovered assault is that the prior exploits we uncovered were mainly about elevation of privileges,” Larin continued. “However, this case includes an exploit with distant code execution abilities, which is extra perilous. Coupled with the skill to have an affect on the most recent Windows 10 builds, the found out attack is certainly a unusual point these days. It reminds us after yet again to invest into prominent threat intelligence and demonstrated protective systems to be in a position to proactively detect the most up-to-date zero-day threats.”
“It is not known how comprehensive the attacks are, but thinking about this bug was documented by Kaspersky, it is realistic to think malware is involved. If you’re nonetheless utilizing IE, make this one your major priority,” said ZDI.
Microsoft patched a next actively exploited zero-day bug, CVE-2020-1464, which was categorised as important, not critical. The flaw is a Windows spoofing vulnerability, brought on by the incorrect validation of file signatures, that could help a malicious actor to “bypass security characteristics and load improperly signed files,” Microsoft warns in its advisory.
In addition to CVE-2020-1380, the remaining 16 critical vulnerabilities consist of two supplemental bugs in the scripting motor, a person in the .Internet Framework, 5 in Media Basis, 1 in Edge, a person Outlook, 3 in the Window Codecs Library, one particular in the MSHTML Engine, a single in NetLogon, and a single in Windows Media. All but a single are remote code execution flaws, when the remainder is an elevation of privileges.