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The September 2020 patch Tuesday contain fixes for 23 Critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and 129 fixes in total – including a Microsoft Exchange vulnerability that can allow remote code execution simply by sending a specially crafted email to the server. A large patch bundle is a double edged sword – it’s reassuring that theRead more

A new vector for pass-the-hash attacks has been discovered targeting Windows 10 personalisation themes. A security researcher has published details of a potential issue with the design of Windows 10 themes that can be exploited to harvest Windows and Microsoft Account login credentials. A Windows 10 theme is a collection of customisation settings for WindowsRead more

Microsoft Application Guard helps protect against malware in Office documents by opening each document in its own segregated virtual machine. Microsoft says in the release notes: Application Guard is a virtualization-based sandbox that’s used to isolate untrusted documents you may encounter. It brings the same technology that powers Azure to your desktop. Untrusted documents areRead more

Microsoft’s August patch-Tuesday bundle fixes 120 vulnerabilities including two under active exploitation- one of them over two years old. Weighing in at 120 fixes, the August 2020 Patch Tuesday is the third largest ever released by Microsoft.  Of particular interest are 17 critical updates and two zero-day exploits which are being actively attacked. IE 11Read more

Microsoft has released a patch to resolve a critical remote code execution vulnerability that has lived in the DNS server code for 17 years. A blog post from the Microsoft Security Response Centre states: Today we released an update for CVE-2020-1350, a Critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Windows DNS Server that is classified as a ‘wormable’ vulnerability and has a CVSS base score of 10.0. This issue results from a flawRead more

Microsoft has launched Project Freta, a new malware detection service aimed at Linux systems. Named Project Freta (after the street where x-ray pioneer Marie Curie lived in Poland) the free service provides a means to scan the memory of Linux systems in order to detect malware.  Rather than install agents or scanning code onto theRead more

In June 2020 Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday fixes a record 129 defects and vulnerabilities in its software – with a further 19 patches in the June Microsoft Office patch bundle. This continues a recent trend of ever-increasing numbers of patches included in the monthly updates from Microsoft (the two previous highest number of patches were inRead more

Microsoft has pushed back the end of support dates for a raft of software versions in order to ease the burden on stretched IT teams during the COVID19 pandemic. Organisations have to keep their systems updated with supported versions of software in order to benefit from the monthly security patches which are essential for networkRead more

April’s patch Tuesday release from Microsoft includes fixes for three zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows that are under active attack. CVE-2020-1020 is a flaw in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library.  According to Microsoft: For all systems except Windows 10, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could execute code remotely. For systems running Windows 10,Read more

Server hardening is a set of disciplines and techniques which improve the security of an ‘off the shelf’ server.  Server Hardening is requirement of security frameworks such as PCI-DSS and is typically included when organisations adopt ISO27001.   What is the attack surface The aim of server hardening is to reduce the attack surface ofRead more