Microsoft Patch Tuesday | March 14
In today’s SensCy Cyber Brief, your SensCy team reviewed Microsoft’s latest series of patches released on Tuesday, January 10, 2023. Today’s Patch Tuesday comes with fixes for two zero-days including a zero-day vulnerability currently used by cyber criminals, and a total of 83 flaws.
What is Patch Tuesday?
Patch Tuesday is Microsoft’s initiative to release new security fixes for the Windows operating system and any other Microsoft software on a monthly basis. Your SensCy team will monitor such releases and provide you with our observations and recommendations.
Why is it important?
This month’s patch Tuesday is critical because it fixes two zero-day vulnerabilities (a vulnerability in a system or device that has been disclosed but is not yet patched). The SensCy team recommends Microsoft users install those patches immediately.
Both zero-day vulnerabilities are actively exploited . The first once can be tracked as CVE-2023-23397 and is a privilege elevation bug that allows specially crafted emails to force a target’s device to connect to a remote URL and transmit the Windows account’s Net-NTLMv2 hash.
The second one can be tracked as CVE-2023-24880 and is a vulnerability in Windows SmartScreen that was previously exploited to distribute and install malware.
In addition to the zero-day fix, Microsoft is also fixing 83 vulnerabilities, with nine classified as “Critical” as they allow privileged elevation, remote code execution, spoofing.
Here is a breakdown of each vulnerability category:
- 21 Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities
- 2 Security Feature Bypass Vulnerabilities
- 27 Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
- 15 Information Disclosure Vulnerabilities
- 4 Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
- 10 Spoofing Vulnerabilities
- 1 Edge – Chromium Vulnerability
For more information on vulnerabilities and the system that it effects, please refer to the full report from Microsoft linked here.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding patch Tuesday and are unsure of the implication of the new updates on your company, please reach out to SensCy.
