Patch Tuesday - December 2023

Patch Tuesday - December 2023

Microsoft is addressing 34 vulnerabilities this December Patch Tuesday, including a single zero-day vulnerability and three critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. December Patch Tuesday has historically seen fewer patches than a typical month, and this trend continues in 2023. This total does not include eight browser vulnerabilities published earlier this month. At time of writing, none of the vulnerabilities patched today are yet added to the CISA KEV list.

Certain AMD processors: zero-day information disclosure

This month’s lone zero-day vulnerability is CVE-2023-20588, which describes a potential information disclosure due to a flaw in certain AMD processor models as listed on the AMD advisory. AMD states that a divide-by-zero on these processor models could potentially return speculative data. AMD believes the potential impact of the vulnerability is low since local access is required; however, Microsoft ranks severity as important under its own proprietary severity scale. The vulnerability is patched at the OS level in all supported versions of Windows, even as far back as Windows Server 2008 for Azure-hosted assets participating in the Extended Security Update (ESU) program.

Outlook: no-interaction critical RCE

CVE-2023-35628 describes a critical RCE vulnerability in the MSHTML proprietary browser engine still used by Outlook, among others, to render HTML content. Of particular note: the most concerning exploitation scenario leads to exploitation as soon as Outlook retrieves and processes the specially crafted malicious email. This means that exploitation could occur before the user interacts with the email in any way; not ev ..

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