Technology giant Microsoft has rolled out a set of security patches for Remote Desktop Services. The latest August security update promises to fix four wormable vulnerabilities that could allow the attackers to extend malware without the need of user’s permission like the previously BlueKeep and WannaCry vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are listed as CVE-2019-1181, CVE-2019-1182, CVE-2019-1222, and CVE-2019-1226.
The August security update promises to fix 93 vulnerabilities that include 29 critical issues and 64 rated as important. As per the company, the affected versions of Windows are Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all supported versions of Windows 10, including server versions. Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 are not affected, nor are the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) itself affected. The vulnerabilities were exposed to the company during the hardening of Remote Desktop Services as a part of Microsoft’s persistent focus on increasing the security of their products. The company stated that at the present time they do not have any evidence that all the mentioned vulnerabilities were known to any third party.
Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) Director of Incident Response, Simon Pope in his blog post said, “It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these, and downloads for these can be found in the Microsoft Security Update Guide. Customers who have automatic updates enabled are automatically protected by these fixes. By default, Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro users will be updated automatically.”
Along with security patches, the new update also comes with preloaded Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Online Services as well as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office services, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Dynamics along with added software packages.
“There is partial mitigation on affected systems that have Network Level Authentication (NLA) enabled. The affected systems are mitigated against ‘wormable’ malware or advanced malware threats that could exploit the vulnerability, as NLA requires authentication before the vulnerability can be triggered. However, affected systems are still vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploitation if the attacker has valid credentials that can be used to successfully authenticate.” Simon Pope further added.
The new August Security Update claims to patch seven remote code execution bugs as well that distress the Chakra scripting engine. It also comes with two fixes for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and two in Word. The update also fixes the dodgeCVE-2019-1162 in the CTF protocol that subsists in all the versions of Windows including Windows XP. The users can download the latest security release on their systems or can also download manually via Microsoft’s Security Update Guide.
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