Microsoft’s monthly batch of security updates has finally arrived, and it addresses some key vulnerabilities that have been recently affecting their products and systems. This iteration of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is the smallest for a while, featuring fixes for 48 total flaws (not including Microsoft Edge flaws); while there are no critical vulnerabilities covered by this patch, there is a fix for one zero-day that was publicly disclosed back in January.
This month’s Patch Tuesday release includes fixes for the following systems and products:
The most important vulnerability addressed this month is this privilege escalation zero-day that exists in Windows Kernel. Successful exploitation of this flaw could allow an attacker to elevate their privileges from a low privilege AppContainer, allowing them to gain access to critical systems and execute arbitrary code. This is a complex attack that will require preparation of the target system before exploiting; because of this, the attack complexity has been marked as high.
This vulnerability was publicly disclosed last month but has not yet been exploited in the wild. While no attacks have been observed yet, proof-of-concept exploits have been released, so expect to see threat actors taking advantage of this soon.
This zero-day was the most significant fix of this patch, while all other flaws were given a severity rating of Important or lower.
The rest of the patch contains fixes for:
For a full list of this month’s updates please see the links below:
Patch Tuesday release notes: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/releaseNote/2022-Feb
Security update guide: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/
Stuart Hare is a Technologist with a passion for helping people in all aspects of IT & Cyber Security. Stuart is the Founder of Ironshare, an Information and Cyber Security company providing consultancy and managed services.
Samuel is a Security Analyst with Ironshare, an Information and Cyber Security company providing Security consultancy and managed services.
Joshua is working as a Managed Service Lead with Ironshare, an Information and Cyber Security company providing Security consultancy and managed services.
