Security News
"The vulnerability affects Windows 10 and corresponding server editions of the Windows OS," said Chris Goettl, senior director of product management and security at Ivanti. "The Windows Fax Service is used by the Windows Fax and Scan application included in all versions of Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 and some earlier versions."
The Microsoft patch drop adds to the workloads for weary defenders struggling to keep pace with the volume and pace of security updates from major vendors. Earlier Tuesday, Adobe shipped fixes for multiple dangerous security holes, including a bug in the Adobe Reader that is being exploited in "Limited targeted attacks" against Windows OS users.
One of the fixed flaws is being actively exploited, the Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver vulnerability disclosed by Google's Project Zero at the end of last month. The CVE-2020-17087 driver bug was also exploited with CVE-2020-15999, a remote-code exec vulnerability in Chrome's font-parsing code, to also hijack targeted people's PCs. All three bugs are now patched; installing the latest software updates fixes them.
Microsoft has plugged 112 security holes, including an actively exploited one. The most information is available about CVE-2020-17087, a Windows Kernel privilege escalation vulnerability, because it's being actively exploited in the wild and because Google disclosed it on October 29, along with PoC exploit code.
Boffins based in Austria, Germany, and the UK have identified yet another data-leaking side-channel flaw affecting Intel processors, and potentially other chips, that exposes cryptographic secrets in memory. The paper describes a way to extract confidential data from devices by measuring power consumption fluctuations in Intel chips from Sandy Bridge onward using just software and without the need to physically wire instruments to machines.
Google's Project Zero bug-hunting team has disclosed a Windows kernel flaw that's being actively exploited by miscreants to gain control of computers. The web giant's bug report was privately disclosed to Microsoft on October 22, and publicly revealed just seven days later, after it detected persons unknown exploiting the programming blunder.
Project Zero, Google's 0day bug-hunting team, today disclosed a zero-day elevation of privileges vulnerability found in the Windows kernel and actively exploited in targeted attacks. The Windows kernel bug zero-day can be exploited by local attackers for privilege escalation according to Project Zero security researchers Mateusz Jurczyk and Sergei Glazunov.
Google and Intel are warning of a high-severity flaw in BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth protocol stack that provides support for core Bluetooth layers and protocols to Linux-based internet of things devices. According to Google, the vulnerability affects users of Linux kernel versions before 5.9 that support BlueZ. BlueZ, which is an open-source project distributed under GNU General Public License, features the BlueZ kernel that has been part of the official Linux kernel since version 2.4.6.
Some information needs to be leaked from the kernel that reveals the current layout of its components in RAM. If a ROP exploit just guesses the kernel's layout and is wrong, it will trigger a crash, and this can be detected and acted on by an administrator. "Using speculative execution for crash suppression allows the elevation of basic memory write vulnerabilities into powerful speculative probing primitives that leak through microarchitectural side effects," the paper stated.
In contrast, a high-end GPU might have 2000 to 5000 cores, but they aren't each able to run completely different instructions at the same time. Servers fitted with GPUs probably need two sets of patches, covering both the NVIDIA GPU drivers that control the actual hardware in the physical system, and the NVIDIA vGPU software, which shares out physical GPUs between guest operating systems running under virtualisation software from vendors including Citrix, Red Hat and VMWare.