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.
This time, Microsoft addressed 129 vulnerabilities: 11 critical and 118 important. In fact, in the file that I exported from the Microsoft website, I saw 2 more CVEs (CVE-2020-1221, CVE-2020-1328) related to Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises). But there is no information on them on the Microsoft website, in the MITRE CVE database and NVD. Does this mean that these CVE ids were mentioned unintentionally and related to some critical issues? I don’t think so, but this is strange.
This time there were no vulnerabilities with detected exploitation, so let’s start with the group “Exploitation more likely” according to Microsoft.
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.
Making the reviews of Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities should be an easy task. All vulnerability data is publicly available. Even better, dozens of reviews have already been written. Just read them, combine and post. Right?
Not really. In fact it is quite boring and annoying. It may be fun to write about vulnerabilities that were already used in some real attacks. But this is a very small part of all vulnerabilities. What about more than a hundred others? They are like “some vulnerability in some component may be used in some attack (or may be not)”. If you describe each of them, no one will read or listen this.
You must choose what to highlight. And when I am reading the reports from Tenable, Qualys and ZDI, I see that they choose very different groups of vulnerabilities, pretty much randomly.
My classification script
That’s why I created a script that takes Patch Tuesday CVE data from microsoft.com and visualizes it giving me helicopter view on what can be interesting there. With nice grouping by vulnerability type and product, with custom icons for vulnerability types, coloring based on severity, etc.
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