Security News
Analysis Chinese authorities have reportedly banned Apple's iPhones from some government offices. News of Beijing's ban was reported by the Wall Street Journal, which mentioned people familiar with the matter as having said employees at some central government regulators were told not to use iPhones for work or bring them into the office.
Microsoft today released a defense-in-depth update for Microsoft Office that prevents exploitation of a remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-36884 that threat actors have already leveraged in attacks. In today's Microsoft August Patch Tuesday, the update helps fix CVE-2023-36884, a security issue disclosed in July, which Microsoft did not patch at the time but provided mitigation advice.
The main executable for the Microsoft Publisher application has already been confirmed that it can download payloads from a remote server. According to recent research, even executables that are not signed by Microsoft serve purposes that are useful in attacks, such as reconnaissance.
CISA ordered federal agencies to mitigate remote code execution zero-days affecting Windows and Office products that were exploited by the Russian-based RomCom cybercriminal group in NATO phishing attacks.Under the binding operational directive issued in November 2021, U.S. Federal Civilian Executive Branch Agencies are now required to secure Windows devices on their networks against attacks exploiting CVE-2023-36884.
"Microsoft is investigating reports of a series of remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting Windows and Office products. Microsoft is aware of targeted attacks that attempt to exploit these vulnerabilities by using specially-crafted Microsoft Office documents," Redmond said today. "An attacker could create a specially crafted Microsoft Office document that enables them to perform remote code execution in the context of the victim. However, an attacker would have to convince the victim to open the malicious file."
Cybersecurity firm Trellix has addressed an incompatibility issue causing Endpoint Security Agent's Exploit Guard module to block some Microsoft Office and third-party apps from opening after...
In case you were wondering, there were 26 Remote Code Execution patches, including four dubbed "Critical", although three of those seem to related bugs that were found and fixed together in a single Windows component. RCE patches generally cause the most concern, because they deal with bugs that can, in theory at least, be exploited by attackers who don't yet have a foothold on your network, which means they represent possible ways of criminals breaking-and-entering in the first place.
Office Open XML Signatures, an Ecma/ISO standard used in Microsoft Office applications and open source OnlyOffice, have several security flaws and can be easily spoofed. Microsoft refers to the format simply as Open XML. The boffins say they found discrepancies in the structure of office documents and the way signatures get verified.
The UK's Criminal Records Office has finally confirmed, after weeks of delaying issuing a statement, that online portal issues experienced since January 17 resulted from what it described as a "Cyber security incident." ACRO is the country's national law enforcement organization responsible for managing criminal record information, providing criminal records on request, and sharing those records with foreign nations.
ACRO, the UK's criminal records office, is combing over a "Cyber security incident" that forced it to pull its customer portal offline. In an email to users this week - seen by El Reg - ACRO confirmed it has "Recently been made aware of a cyber security incident affecting the website between 17th January 2023 and 21 March 2023.".