Microsoft Releases 71 Fixes This Month Including 3 Public Aware Threats

There are 3 patches rated Critical and 68 are rated Important.  Microsoft Windows and Windows Components, Azure Site Recovery, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and IoT, Intune, Edge (Chromium-based), Windows HTML Platforms, Office and Office Components, Skype for Chrome, .NET and Visual Studio, Windows RDP and SMB Server have all been updated.

Year 3 Extended Support – Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (including R2) have received some updates this month.

Robert Brown, Head of Customer Success for Syxsense said, “Public Aware threats do not often go to Weaponized, but do you want to be the IT Manager who didn’t prioritize these updates? There are very few Critical severity patches this month for the release, but that doesn’t mean some of the Important updates should be ignored.  Your patching strategy should be based on the risk you are prepared to take, and if the risk if too high then deploy those patches.”

Top March 2022 Patches and Vulnerabilities

Based on the Vendor Severity and CVSS Score, we have made a few recommendations below. As usual, we recommend our customers enter the CVE numbers below into your patch management solution and deploy as soon as possible.

1. CVE-2022-21990: Remote Desktop Client Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

In the case of a Remote Desktop connection, an attacker with control of a Remote Desktop Server could trigger a remote code execution (RCE) on the RDP client machine when a victim connects to the attacking server with the vulnerable Remote Desktop Client.

This vulnerability is ‘More Likely’ to be used as an entry point as suggested by Microsoft.  Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may result in complete compromise of vulnerable system.

Syxscore

• Vendor Severity: Important
• CVSS: 8.8
• Weaponized: No
• Public Aware: Yes
• Countermeasure: No

Syxscore Risk

• Attack Vector: Network
• Attack Complexity: Low
• Privileges: None
• User Interaction: Required
• Scope (Jump Point): Unchanged / No

2. CVE-2022-24459: Windows Fax and Scan Service Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

Vulnerabilities details are unknown at this time but an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run arbitrary code. Keep an eye on this for changes in severity or priority.

Syxscore

• Vendor Severity: Important
• CVSS: 7.8
• Weaponized: No
• Public Aware: Yes
• Countermeasure: No 

Syxscore Risk

• Attack Vector: Local
• Attack Complexity: Low
• Privileges: Low
• User Interaction: None
• Scope (Jump Point): Unchanged / No

3. CVE-2022-24508: Windows SMBv3 Client/Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system and is ‘More Likely’ to be used as an entry point as suggested by Microsoft.  Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may result in complete compromise of vulnerable system.

Syxscore

• Vendor Severity: Network
• CVSS: 8.8
• Weaponized: No
• Public Aware: No
• Countermeasure: Yes – see here

Syxscore Risk

• Attack Vector: Network
• Attack Complexity: Low
• Privileges: Low
• User Interaction: None
• Scope (Jump Point): Unchanged / No