Security News
Microsoft has released its April 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, its first big patch update released since the work-from-home era truly got underway. "The primary way would be to socially engineer a user into visiting a website containing the malicious code, whether owned by the attacker, or a compromised website with the malicious code injected into it. An attacker could also socially engineer the user into opening a malicious Microsoft Office document that embeds the malicious code."
For the April 2020 Patch Tuesday, Adobe plugs 5 flaws and Microsoft 113, three of which are currently being exploited by attackers. One of the patches fixes CVE-2020-0968, a RCE in Internet Explorer 11 and 9, which Microsoft initially flagged as being exploited in the wild.
VMware has fixed a critical vulnerability affecting vCenter Server, which can be exploited to extract highly sensitive information that could be used to compromise vCenter Server or other services which depend on the VMware Directory Service for authentication. vCenter Server is server management software for controlling VMware vSphere environments.
Oracle admins are staring down the barrel of a massive quarterly Critical Patch Update that includes 405 patches. Impacted with multiple critical flaws, rated 9.8 CVSS in severity, are 13 key Oracle products including Oracle Financial Services Applications, Oracle MySQL, Oracle Retail Applications and Oracle Support Tools, according to the company's April Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement, posted Monday.
Two days after March Patch Tuesday Microsoft released an update for the Windows SMBv3 vulnerability associated with CVE-2020-0796. There is no control over the update being applied on a system running Home edition, so for employees, or their children doing schoolwork, this update could be very disruptive.
VMDR continuously assesses these assets for the latest vulnerabilities and applies the latest threat intel analysis to prioritize actively exploitable vulnerabilities. The reason is, if you look at the statistics over the last 10 years, you would see that the total number of vulnerabilities which get discovered in a year, maybe let's say 15,000 to 16,000 of vulnerabilities that are getting discovered, out of those vulnerabilities, only a handful, like 1000 vulnerabilities get exploited.
Mozilla has released critical security updates for Firefox and Firefox ESR on Friday, patching two vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited by attackers. Update ASAP. Home users and enterprise admins are advised to implement the provided updates as soon as possible.
Mozilla just pushed out an update for its Firefox browser to patch a security hole that was already being exploited in the wild. Given that the bug needed patching in both the latest and the ESR versions, we can assume either that the vulnerability has been in the Firefox codebase at least since version 68 first appeared, which was back in July 2019, or that it was introduced as a side effect of a security fix that came out after version 68.0 showed up.0, so the ESR is popular with IT departments who want to avoid frequent feature updates that might require changes in company workflow, but don't want to lag behind on security patches.
A patch has been released for a Linux kernel vulnerability that a researcher used at the recent Pwn2Own 2020 hacking competition to escalate privileges to root on Ubuntu Desktop. He leveraged an improper input validation bug in the Linux kernel to escalate privileges to root.
A researcher has stumbled on a big security flaw affecting OpenWrt, an open source operating system used by millions of home and small business routers and embedded devices. OpenWrt has become a popular Linux alternative to the stock software that vendors ship with home routers.