Security News

Siemens and Schneider Electric on Tuesday released 18 security advisories addressing a total of more than 50 vulnerabilities affecting their products. Siemens has released 10 new advisories for the August 2021 Patch Tuesday and they cover a total of 32 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft today released software updates to plug at least 44 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related products. Microsoft said attackers have seized upon CVE-2021-36948, which is a weakness in the Windows Update Medic service.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by the fact that it's August and Patch Tuesday brings word of only 44 vulnerabilities in Microsoft's software. There's a bit of selective counting here however, given that Microsoft has been patching Edge's Chromium bugs separately.

The zero-day attacks against Microsoft's software products continue to pile up with a new warning from Redmond about a zero-day attack hitting a security defect in the Windows Update Medic Service. The Windows Update Medic Service is used to repair Windows Update components from damage so that Windows machines can continue to receive software updates.

Today is Microsoft's August 2021 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for three zero-day vulnerabilities and a total of 44 flaws, so please be nice to your Windows admins as they scramble to installed patches. Microsoft has fixed 44 vulnerabilities with today's update, with seven classified as Critical and 37 as Important.

Patch bypass flaw in Pulse Secure VPNs can lead to total compromiseThe patch for a vulnerability in Pulse Connect Secure VPN devices that attackers have been exploiting in the wild can be bypassed, security researcher Rich Warren has found. Vulnerable TCP/IP stack is used by almost 200 device vendorsResearchers have discovered 14 new vulnerabilities affecting the proprietary NicheStack TCP/IP stack, used in OT devices such as the extremely popular Siemens S7 PLCs. A look at the 2021 CWE Top 25 most dangerous software weaknessesThe 2021 Common Weakness Enumeration Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses is a demonstrative list of the most common issues experienced over the previous two calendar years.

If you use Microsoft's security only updates each month, be sure to include the security only out-of-band updates for your operating systems, because they must be installed for the PrintNightmare fix; they were not included in the Patch Tuesday set of security only updates. The release of zero-day updates, particularly one of this magnitude, provides an excellent opportunity to validate your emergency patching policies and procedures.

Microsoft has addressed the Windows 10 printing issues caused by changes introduced in the June 2021 cumulative update preview with an update issued during this month's Patch Tuesday. To resolve the printing issues, Microsoft released an emergency fix for Windows 10 2004, Windows 10 20H2, and Windows 10 21H1 on July 9, rolling it out via the Known Issue Rollback feature.

Industrial giants Siemens and Schneider Electric on Tuesday released a total of two dozen advisories covering roughly 100 vulnerabilities affecting their products. The 18 new advisories prepared by Siemens for the July 2021 Patch Tuesday cover nearly 80 vulnerabilities impacting the company's products.

Microsoft released an XL-sized bundle of security fixes for its products for this month's Patch Tuesday, and other vendors are close behind in issuing updates. The Windows goliath's batch for July has 117 patches, 13 for what's said to be critical bugs, 103 important, and one moderate.