Microsoft has pushed out fixes for 87 security vulnerabilities in October – 11 of them critical – and one of those is potentially wormable.
There are also six bugs that were previously unpatched but publicly disclosed, which could give cybercriminals a leg up — and in fact at least one public exploit is already circulating for this group.
This month’s Patch Tuesday overall includes fixes for bugs in Microsoft Windows, Office and Office Services and Web Apps, Azure Functions, Open Source Software, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, .NET Framework, Microsoft Dynamics, and the Windows Codecs Library.
A full 75 are listed as important, and just one is listed as moderate in severity. None are listed as being under active attack, but the group does include six issues that were known but unpatched before this month’s regularly scheduled updates.
“As usual, whenever possible, it’s better to prioritize updates against the Windows operating system,” Richard Tsang, senior software engineer at Rapid7, told Threatpost. “Coming in at 53 of the 87 vulnerabilities, patching the OS knocks out 60 percent of the vulnerabilities listed, along with over half of the critical RCE vulnerabilities resolved today.”
11 Critical Bugs
One of the most notable critical bugs, according to researchers, is a remote code-execution (RCE) problem in the TCP/IP stack. That issue (CVE-2020-16898) allows attackers to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges using a specially crafted ICMPv6 router advertisement.
Microsoft gives this bug its highest exploitability rating, meaning attacks in the wild are extremely likely – and as such, it carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10 on the CvSS vulnerability scale. True to the season, it could be an administrator’s horror show.
“If you’re running an IPv6 network, you know that filtering router advertisements is not a practical workaround,” said Dustin Childs, researcher at Trend Micro’s Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI), in his Patch Tuesday analysis. “You should definitely test and deploy this patch as soon as possible.”
Bharat Jogi, senior manager of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys, said that an exploit for the bug could be self-propagating, worming through infrastructure without user interaction.
“An attacker can exploit this vulnerability without any authentication, and it is potentially wormable,” he said. “We expect a proof-of-concept (PoC) for this exploit would be dropped soon, and we highly encourage everyone to fix this vulnerability as soon as possible.”
Threatpost has reached out for more technical details on the wormable aspect of the bug.
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