The criticality of the Elevation of Privilege – Windows Error Reporting Service (CVE-2024-26169) vulnerability has increased. If exploited successfully, the attacker gains SYSTEM privileges. The vulnerability was fixed in Microsoft’s March Patch Tuesday. As often happens, no one highlighted this vulnerability back then. 🤷♂️
However, 3 months later, on June 12, Symantec researchers reported attacks related to the famous Black Basta ransomware, in which exploits for this vulnerability were used. If we believe the compilation timestamps, these exploits were created long before the release of Microsoft’s patches, in February 2024 or even December 2023. Of course, attackers could fake them, but why would they do that? 🤔
On June 13, the vulnerability was added to CISA KEV. The exploit is not yet publicly available.
The moral is the same: vulnerability prioritization is good, but regular unconditional patching is better.
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