Microsoft at present launched updates to repair greater than 50 safety vulnerabilities in Home windows and associated software program, a comparatively gentle Patch Tuesday this month for Home windows customers. The software program big additionally responded to a torrent of unfavourable 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 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 consumer is doing on their PC. Safety specialists roundly trashed Recall as a elaborate keylogger, noting that it will be a gold mine of data for attackers if the consumer’s PC was compromised with malware.
Microsoft countered that Recall snapshots by no means go away the consumer’s system, and that even when attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they might not be capable of exfiltrate on-device Recall information. However that declare rang hole after former Microsoft risk analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his blog how any consumer on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall information, which is simply saved in an SQLite database domestically.
“I’m not being hyperbolic after I say that is the dumbest cybersecurity transfer in a decade,” Beaumont said on Mastodon.
In a current Risky Business podcast, host Patrick Grey famous that the screenshots created and listed by Recall could be a boon to any attacker who all of a sudden finds himself in an unfamiliar setting.
“The very first thing you wish to do once you get on a machine in the event 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 towards 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 said last week that it’s going to not be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs.
Solely one of many patches launched at present — CVE-2024-30080 — earned Microsoft’s most pressing “important” score, that means malware or malcontents may exploit the vulnerability to remotely seize management over a consumer’s system, with none consumer interplay.
CVE-2024-30080 is a flaw within the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service that may permit attackers to execute code of their selecting. Microsoft says exploitation of this weak point is probably going, sufficient to encourage customers to disable the weak element if updating isn’t potential within the brief 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 isn’t a default service on Home windows.
“A Shodan seek for MSMQ reveals there are a number of thousand probably internet-facing MSSQ servers that may very well be weak to zero-day assaults if not patched shortly,” Breen stated.
CVE-2024-30078 is a distant code execution weak point within the Home windows WiFi Driver, which additionally has a CVSS rating of 9.8. In keeping with Microsoft, an unauthenticated attacker may exploit this bug by sending a malicious information 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 lot of critical safety points with its Workplace functions, together with at the least 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 consumer 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 consumer opening a malicious file.”
Individually, Adobe launched safety updates for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and Photoshop, among others.
As common, the SANS Internet Storm Center has the thin on the person patches launched at present, listed by severity, exploitability and urgency. Home windows admins also needs to regulate AskWoody.com, which regularly publishes early experiences of any Home windows patches gone awry.
