July's Patch Tuesday brings fixes for 47 vulnerabilities across Microsoft's products Credit: Microsoft Microsoft’s new batch of security patches fixes 47 vulnerabilities across its products, including in Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Windows and the .NET Framework. The patches, released Tuesday, are arranged in 11 security bulletins, 10 of which are for Microsoft products. The remaining patch covers Adobe Flash Player, which is bundled with Internet Explorer in Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 10. Six security bulletins, including the Flash Player one, are rated critical and primarily cover remote code execution vulnerabilities that could lead to a complete system compromise. Aside from the typical browser flaws that can be exploited through malicious web pages and those in Office that can be exploited through specifically crafted documents, two others stand out: one in the JScript and VBScript scripting engines of Windows and one in the operating system’s Print Spooler service. The scripting engine flaw could allow remote code execution with the privileges of the current user. It can be exploited through malicious code hosted on websites or through an ActiveX control marked as “safe for initialization” in an application or Microsoft Office document that hosts the IE rendering engine. The Print Spooler service flaw is even more serious. It allows an attacker who compromises a network printer or who can spoof a printer on the network to trick a user’s computer into installing a malicious printer driver when connecting to a new printer. Because this would be a system driver, the attacker’s malicious code would be executed with system-level privileges. Even worse, the flaw can also be exploited from outside the network if the user visits a compromised web page or loads a malicious ad in his browser, according to researchers from Vectra who discovered the issue. That’s possible because the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and the web Point-and-Print Protocol allow the same seamless installation of printer drivers that happens over the local network when adding a new printer. As usual, companies should prioritize the patches described in the critical-rated bulletins, but should also review the ones rated as important, as they could prove urgent for their specific environments. One of this month’s bulletins rated as important covers a privilege escalation vulnerability in kernel-mode drivers. This type of vulnerability is important in modern exploit chains and is used in targeted attacks to gain full control over systems after limited accounts have been compromised through other flaws. Another bulletin covers a vulnerability that could allow attackers to bypass the Windows Secure Boot feature if an attacker gains administrative privileges and installs an affected policy on a system. Secure Boot uses cryptographic verifications to ensure that only digitally signed and approved code is loaded during the system boot-up, therefore preventing the installation of stealthy, boot-level rootkits. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could disable code integrity checks, allowing test-signed executables and drivers to be loaded on a target device,” Microsoft said in the security bulletin. “In addition, an attacker could bypass the Secure Boot Integrity Validation for BitLocker and the Device Encryption security features.” Related content feature What is a digital twin and why is it important to IoT? Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical devices that IT pros and data scientists can use to run simulations before actual devices are built and deployed. Digital twins can also take real-time IoT data and apply AI and data analytics to optimiz By Josh Fruhlinger and Keith Shaw May 09, 2024 17 mins Internet of Things Network Security Networking news 2024 global network outage report and internet health check ThousandEyes tracks internet and cloud traffic and provides Network World with weekly updates on the performance of ISPs, cloud service providers, and UCaaS providers. By Ann Bednarz May 08, 2024 43 mins Internet Service Providers Network Management Software Cloud Computing news Google Cloud issue blamed for UniSuper week-long service disruption A misconfiguration during provisioning triggered a previously unknown software bug, causing the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud. By Elizabeth Montalbano May 08, 2024 4 mins Cloud Computing Data Center news IBM Power server targets AI workloads at the edge The Power S1012 server can be deployed in edge computing sites so IT teams can run AI inferencing workloads at the point of data and cut back on data transfers. By Michael Cooney May 08, 2024 3 mins Edge Computing Servers Data Center PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe