Security News

The first Patch Tuesday of 2022 is upon us, and Microsoft has delivered patches for 96 CVE-numbered vulnerabilities, including a wormable RCE flaw in Windows Server. Among the publicly known flaws are a "Critical" RCE in curl and "Important" RCE in libarchive open source libraries, which have now been "Fixed" in Windows 10, 11 and Server with the inclusion of the most recent versions of the libraries.

The new update is now available for Windows 10 version 21H2, version 21H1, and version 20H2 As per the official release notes, Microsoft has published two main cumulative updates for Windows 10 - KB5009543 and KB5009545. This month's cumulative updates include security fixes for November 2021 Update, May 2021 Update, October 2020 Update.

Microsoft has released the Windows 11 KB5009566 cumulative update with security updates, performance improvements, and fixes for known bugs. KB5009566 is a mandatory cumulative update as it contains the January 2022 Patch Tuesday security updates for vulnerabilities discovered in previous months.

A new multi-platform backdoor malware named 'SysJoker' has emerged in the wild, targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS with the ability to evade detection on all three operating systems. The discovery of the new malware comes from researchers at Intezer who first saw signs of its activity in December 2021 after investigating an attack on a Linux-based web server.

A new multi-platform backdoor malware named 'SysJocker' has emerged in the wild, targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS with the ability to evade detection on all three operating systems. The discovery of the new malware comes from researchers at Intezer who first saw signs of its activity in December 2021 after investigating an attack on a Linux-based web server.

Dubbed SysJoker by Intezer, the backdoor is used for establishing initial access on a target machine. A possible attack vector for SysJoker is an infected npm package, according to Intezer's analysis - an increasingly popular vector for dropping malware on targets.

Microsoft has acknowledged an issue triggered by a Windows 10, version 21H2 security update released during the December 2021 Patch Tuesday that leads to search issues in Outlook for Microsoft 365. "After you install update KB5008212, recent emails may not appear in search results," Microsoft explained in a recently published Office support document.

The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. In terms of quality at the point of release, Halo Infinite has stepped out as the clear winner.

Microsoft has released an emergency out-of-band update to address a Windows Server bug leading to Remote Desktop connection and performance issues. Affected platforms include Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2012 R2. The updates that address this issue are not available from Windows Update and will not install automatically on affected systems.

"The Microsoft Pluton is a security processor, pioneered in Xbox and Azure Sphere, designed to store sensitive data, like encryption keys, securely within the Pluton hardware, which is integrated into the die of a device's CPU and is therefore more difficult for attackers to access, even if they have physical possession of a device," explained David Weston, Director of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft. In November 2020, Microsoft announced it would integrate its Pluton security processor into Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm CPUs as an on-die chip to reduce the available attack surface on Windows PCs. First introduced with the XBOX One and Azure Sphere, Pluton emulates a Trusted Platform Module to protect the boot process, encryption keys, and credentials directly on the CPU with the end goal of blocking threat actors from gaining access to such sensitive data.