Today’s Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft issuing fixes for over 70 CVEs, affecting the usual mix of their product lines. From Windows, Edge, and Office, to Exchange, SharePoint, and Dynamics, there is plenty of patching to do for workstation and server administrators alike.
One vulnerability has already been seen exploited in the wild: CVE-2021-40449 is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows, including the newly released Windows 11. Rated as Important, this is likely being used alongside Remote Code Execution (RCE) and/or social engineering attacks to gain more complete control of targeted systems.
Three CVEs were publicly disclosed before today, though haven’t yet been observed in active exploitation. CVE-2021-40469 is an RCE vulnerability affecting Microsoft DNS servers, CVE-2021-41335 is another privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows Kernel, and CVE-2021-41338 is a flaw in Windows AppContainer allowing attackers to bypass firewall rules.
Attackers will likely be paying attention to the latest Windows Print Spooler vulnerability – CVE-2021-36970 is a Spoofing vulnerability with a CVSSv3 score of 8.8 that we don’t yet have much more information about. Also worth noting is CVE-2021-40486, an RCE affecting Microsoft Word, OWA, as well as SharePoint Server, which can be exploited via the Preview Pane. patch tuesday october
