Microsoft February Patch Tuesday – Patches zero-day vulnerabilities in IE and Exchange

Yesterday, Microsoft released its monthly roll-up of security patches known as Patch Tuesday. This month, the Redmond-based company fixed 77 security flaws across a wide range of products, from Microsoft Edge to the Azure IoT SDK. The most critical of all fixed bugs is a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s old Internet Explorer browser that the OS maker says it’s been already exploited in the wild.

Satnam Narang, Senior Research Engineer at Tenable:

“This month’s Patch Tuesday release contains updates for over 70 CVEs, including fixes for the Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege 0-day vulnerability known as “PrivExchange” (CVE-2019-0686) that was publicly disclosed, along with proof-of-concept code, last month. If exploited, the vulnerability would give an attacker Domain Administrator privileges that would allow them to access domain user credentials. PrivExchange is also addressed by CVE-2019-0724. Given the severity and publicity of the vulnerability, organisations should patch immediately.

“This month’s release also contains a fix for CVE-2019-0676, an Internet Explorer Information Disclosure vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild. Through social engineering, an attacker would convince the victim to visit a malicious website. They would then be able to confirm whether certain files were available on the victim’s system. As this flaw is being actively exploited in the wild, it should be prioritised by IT security teams.

“Additionally, Microsoft patched a critical Windows Server DHCP remote code execution vulnerability, which received the highest CVSS score in this month’s release. This follows last month’s fix of another Windows DHCP Client Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2019-0547).”