Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between February and March Patch Tuesdays.
As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7, ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2023 was quite refreshing. 😈
Hello everyone! Let’s take a look at Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday. This time it is quite compact. There were 63 CVEs released on Patch Tuesday day. If we add the vulnerabilities released between August and September Patch Tuesdays (as usual, they were in Microsoft Edge), the final number is 90. Much less than usual.
Hello everyone! In this episode, let’s take a look at the latest vulnerabilities in Gitlab. On March 31, the Critical Security Release for GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) was released. GitLab recommends that all installations running a version affected by the issues described in the bulletin are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, Gitlab, as well as some other Western companies, is currently hostile to the country where I live and work. So their calls to immediately install updates now have additional connotations. If Gitlab is so clearly politically motivated that even the logo on their site has been recolored in a certain way, then what else can be expected from their updates? Backdoors? Malicious functionality that wipes data? Quite possible. IMHO, when companies are so willing to mix geopolitical messages and business, it exposes them as unreliable vendors that should be avoided.
But let’s get back to vulnerabilities. There are 17 CVEs in the bulletin. We will start with the most critical one.
Hello everyone! It has been 3 months since my last review of Microsoft vulnerabilities for Q4 2020. In this episode I want to review the Microsoft vulnerabilities for the first quarter of 2021. There will be 4 parts: January, February, March and the vulnerabilities that were released between the Patch Tuesdays.
I will be using the reports that I created with my Vulristics tool. This time I’ll try to make the episodes shorter. I will describe only the most critical vulnerabilities. Links to the full reports are at the bottom of the blog post.
This will be my third Microsoft Patch Tuesday report in video and audio format. And for the third time in a row, Microsoft has addressed over a hundred vulnerabilities. With my Microsoft Patch Tuesday parser, it was possible to generate a report almost on the same day. But, of course, it takes much more time to describe the vulnerabilities manually.
All vulnerabilities: 111
Critical: 16
Important: 95
Moderate: 0
Low: 0
Last time I complained that different VM vendors release completely different reports for Microsoft Patch Tuesday. This time I decided that it’s not a bug, but a feature. I upgraded my script to not only show vulnerabilities, but also show how these vulnerabilities were mentioned in the reports of various VM vendors (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and ZDI). In my opinion, it seems pretty useful.
Without a doubt, the hottest Microsoft vulnerability in March 2020 is the “Wormable” Remote Code Execution in SMB v3 CVE-2020-0796. The most commonly used names for this vulnerability are EternalDarkness, SMBGhost and CoronaBlue.
There was a strange story of how it was disclosed. It seems like Microsoft accidentally mentioned it in their blog. Than they somehow found out that the patch for this vulnerability will not be released in the March Patch Tuesday. So, they removed the reference to this vulnerability from the blogpost as quickly as they could.
But some security experts have seen it. And, of course, after EternalBlue and massive cryptolocker attacks in 2017, each RCE in SMB means “OMG, this is happening again, we need to do something really fast!” So, Microsoft just had to publish an advisory for this vulnerability with the workaround ADV200005 and to release an urgent patch KB4551762.
My last post about Guinea Pigs and Vulnerability Management products may seem unconvincing without some examples. So, let’s review one. It’s a common problem that exists among nearly all VM vendors, I will demonstrate it on Tenable Nessus.
And, as you can see, it has formalized “Risk Information” data in the right column. There is only one CVSS score and vector, one CPE, one exploitability flag, one criticality level. Probably because of architectural limitations of the scanner. So, two very simple questions:
for which CVE (of these 23) is this formalized Risk Information block?
for which CVE (of these 23) exploit is available?
Ok, maybe they show CVSS for the most critical (by their logic) CVE. Maybe they somehow combine this parameter from data for different CVEs. But in most cases this will be inaccurate. Risk information data for every of these 23 vulnerabilities should be presented independently.
As you can see on the screenshot, one of these vulnerabilities is RCE the other is Information Disclosure. Vulnerability Management solution tells us that there is an exploit. Is this exploit for RCE or DoS? You should agree, that it can be crucial for vulnerability prioritization. And more than this, in the example there are 7 different RCEs in Internet Explorer, MSXML parser, Windows Hyper-V, etc. All this mean different attack scenarios. How is it possible to show it Vulnerability Scanner like one entity with one CVSS and exploitability flag? What can the user get from this? How to search in all this?
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