Tag Archives: MS Word

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2023: CLFS EoP, Word RCE, MSMQ QueueJumper RCE, PCL6, DNS, DHCP

1 Reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday April 2023: CLFS EoP, Word RCE, MSMQ QueueJumper RCE, PCL6, DNS, DHCP. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between March and April Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239123

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. And this is the first Patch Tuesday report since I added EPSS support to Vulristics. 😉

Compared to March, Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2023 is kind of weak. 🙄

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2023: Win Graphics RCE, Edge RCE, Publisher SFB, CLFS EoP, Exchange RCEs, Word RCE, HoloLens1

Leave a reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2023: Win Graphics RCE, Edge RCE, Publisher SFB, CLFS EoP, Exchange RCEs, Word RCE, HoloLens1. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between January and February Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239118

This month I decided to change the format a bit. Now I share my impression of Microsoft Patch Tuesday on the same Patch Tuesday day in my main telegram channel avleonovcom and my second russian telegram channel avleonovrus. You can also find a draft of the Vulristics report there. So please subscribe. And the full blog post/video is published with a delay. And, in fact, this is it.

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.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday September 2020: Zerologon and other exploits, RCEs in SharePoint and Exchange

1 Reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday September 2020: Zerologon and other exploits, RCEs in SharePoint and Exchange. I would like to start this post by talking about Microsoft vulnerabilities, which recently turned out to be much more serious than it seemed at first glance.

Older Vulnerabilities with exploits

“Zerologon” Netlogon RCE (CVE-2020-1472)

One of them is, of course, the Netlogon vulnerability from the August 2020 Patch Tuesday. It’s called “Zerologon”. I would not say that Vulnerability Management vendors completely ignored it. But none of them (well, maybe only ZDI) emphasized in their reports that this vulnerability would be a real disaster.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE and updates for February goldies

Leave a reply

Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 “Wormable” RCE and updates for February goldies. 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.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2020: a new record was set, SMBv3 "Wormable" RCE and updates for February goldies

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.

Continue reading →

Asset Inventory for Network Perimeter: from Declarations to Active Scanning

7 Replies

Asset Inventory for Network Perimeter: from Declarations to Active Scanning. In the previous post, I shared some of my thoughts about the good Asset Inventory system. Of course, for me as a Security Specialist, it would be great if IT will provide such magical system. 🙂 But such an ideal situation is rarely possible. So now let’s see how to build an Asset Inventory system using the resources of Information Security team.

There are no special secrets. It’s necessary to get information about the assets from all available IT systems and then get the rest of the data using our own Assessment tools. I would like to start with hosts on Network Perimeter. The Network Perimeter targets are available at any time for hacker attacks, that’s why this part of the network is the most critical.

Asset Inventory for Network Perimeter

Network Perimeter is like the Wall in the Game of Thrones. The same white walkers are hiding behind the wall and our task is to find the breaches in the wall faster than potential intruders. “Night gathers, and now my watch begins”. (c)

Perimeter is changing constantly. And we should understand at any time what hosts are currently exposed in every office and every external hosting platform.

We can get information about external hosts using some Vulnerability Scanner located on external host in the Internet. I have already wrote about it briefly in  Vulnerability Management for Network Perimeter. Here I would like focus on how we can understand which hosts should be scanned and what useful information we can get from the raw scan results.

Continue reading →

Processing .docx and .xlsx files with Python

2 Replies

Processing .docx and .xlsx files with Python. MS Office documents are probably one of the most inconvenient and poorly formalized data sources. It’s much better to keep all the data in specialized databases or at least in wiki. But in real life, MS Office documents, especially Excel and Word, are in active use in nearly every organization. Simply because it is a flexible and easy tool that anyone can use. That’s why it’s important to know an automated ways for processing such files.

Processing MS office files with python

You can easily edit .docx files without any libraries. Technically it’s just a zip archive. So, you can unzip it, make a replacement in the document.xml file and make a zip it again. It’s much better than dealing with old binary .doc files. But there are even more elegant ways.

Let’s says, we need to read data from .xlsx document and generate .docx files based on some existing template. To work with .xlsx files I will use openpyxl python library.

Continue reading →