Microsoft right now launched updates to repair greater than 50 safety vulnerabilities in Home windows and associated software program, a comparatively mild Patch Tuesday this month for Home windows customers. The software program big additionally responded to a torrent of damaging suggestions on a brand new characteristic of Redmond’s flagship working system that continually takes screenshots of no matter customers are doing on their computer systems, saying the characteristic would now not be enabled by default.
Final month, Microsoft debuted Copilot+ PCs, an AI-enabled model of Home windows. Copilot+ ships with a characteristic no one requested for that Redmond has aptly dubbed Recall, which continually takes screenshots of what the person is doing on their PC. Safety specialists roundly trashed Recall as a elaborate keylogger, noting that it will be a gold mine of knowledge for attackers if the person’s PC was compromised with malware.
Microsoft countered that Recall snapshots by no means go away the person’s system, and that even when attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they’d not have the ability to exfiltrate on-device Recall knowledge. However that declare rang hole after former Microsoft risk analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his weblog how any person on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall knowledge, which is simply saved in an SQLite database regionally.
“I’m not being hyperbolic after I say that is the dumbest cybersecurity transfer in a decade,” Beaumont stated on Mastodon.
In a current Dangerous Enterprise podcast, host Patrick Grey famous that the screenshots created and listed by Recall could be a boon to any attacker who immediately finds himself in an unfamiliar surroundings.
“The very first thing you wish to do if you get on a machine should you’re as much as no good is to determine how somebody did their job,” Grey stated. “We noticed that within the case of the SWIFT assaults in opposition to central banks years in the past. Attackers needed to do display recordings to determine how transfers work. And this might pace up that type of discovery course of.”
Responding to the withering criticism of Recall, Microsoft stated final week that it’ll now not be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs.
Solely one of many patches launched right now — CVE-2024-30080 — earned Microsoft’s most pressing “crucial” ranking, that means malware or malcontents may exploit the vulnerability to remotely seize management over a person’s system, with none person interplay.
CVE-2024-30080 is a flaw within the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service that may enable attackers to execute code of their selecting. Microsoft says exploitation of this weak spot is probably going, sufficient to encourage customers to disable the susceptible part if updating isn’t potential within the quick run. CVE-2024-30080 has been assigned a CVSS vulnerability rating of 9.8 (10 is the worst).
Kevin Breen, senior director of risk analysis at Immersive Labs, stated a saving grace is that MSMQ just isn’t a default service on Home windows.
“A Shodan seek for MSMQ reveals there are a number of thousand doubtlessly internet-facing MSSQ servers that may very well be susceptible to zero-day assaults if not patched shortly,” Breen stated.
CVE-2024-30078 is a distant code execution weak spot within the Home windows WiFi Driver, which additionally has a CVSS rating of 9.8. In line with Microsoft, an unauthenticated attacker may exploit this bug by sending a malicious knowledge packet to anybody else on the identical community — that means this flaw assumes the attacker has entry to the native community.
Microsoft additionally mounted a variety of critical safety points with its Workplace purposes, together with no less than two remote-code execution flaws, stated Adam Barnett, lead software program engineer at Rapid7.
“CVE-2024-30101 is a vulnerability in Outlook; though the Preview Pane is a vector, the person should subsequently carry out unspecified particular actions to set off the vulnerability and the attacker should win a race situation,” Barnett stated. “CVE-2024-30104 doesn’t have the Preview Pane as a vector, however however finally ends up with a barely increased CVSS base rating of seven.8, since exploitation depends solely on the person opening a malicious file.”
Individually, Adobe launched safety updates for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and Photoshop, amongst others.
As standard, the SANS Web Storm Heart has the thin on the person patches launched right now, listed by severity, exploitability and urgency. Home windows admins also needs to keep watch over AskWoody.com, which frequently publishes early studies of any Home windows patches gone awry.
