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Every second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft releases many security fixes to several of its software solutions, this is known as “Patch Tuesday.” This time around there have been several critical vulnerabilities and zero-days which have been remediated with the recent fixes. A total of two zero-day vulnerabilities and five critical vulnerabilities alongside 60+ other various vulnerabilities of varying severity. This report will only cover the most critical/notable vulnerabilities.
Two Actively Exploited Zero Days
Five Critical severity vulnerabilities
There is a total of 67 other CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) associated with February 2024 Patch Tuesday which has been released by Microsoft. All CVEs can be viewed at the Microsoft Security Update Guide, below there is a list of affected software for all new CVEs associated with the recent updates.
Internet Shortcut Files, Windows SmartScreen ,Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Windows, Windows Message Queuing, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure File Sync, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft WDAC OLE DB provider for SQL, Microsoft Office OneNote, Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Windows DNS, Microsoft Teams for Android, Azure Site Recovery, Windows Kernel, Windows LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Microsoft WDAC ODBC Driver, Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), SQL Server, Windows Win32K – ICOMP, Role: DNS Server, Windows USB Serial Driver, Windows Hyper-V, Skype for Business, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trusted Compute Base, Azure Stack, Microsoft Office, .NET, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Office Word, Windows OLE, Microsoft ActiveX, Azure Connected Machine Agent, Azure DevOps
If you are a regular user of Windows, simply checking your operating system for updates and restarting will be all that must be done. However, if you are part of an organization reviewing the affected products list above for any affected products and reviewing and planning to apply the updates to the environment must be done. Not all updates/fixes to the above products are applied through an OS update, but most are.
Checking for updates and restarting endpoints for Microsoft Windows devices. Microsoft server devices is different, see the article here on how to upgrade Microsoft server instances.
Most remediations will require a restart of the device after updates are found. For more information about what products are affected and to have updates for each vulnerability please refer to the MSRC links and KB articles from Microsoft. Use the following link to the Microsoft Security Update Guide and search for potential affected products and their associated KB articles. Ensure to select date range and select “Update Tuesday” to search for all relevant KBs and updates. This will allow a more accurate determination of what update each of the affected software requires.
Microsoft patch Tuesday patches 100s of vulnerabilities every year and sheds light on actively exploited vulnerabilities. It is important that these zero-day vulnerabilities are prioritized in an emergency fashion as exploitation of any of these vulnerabilities could be devastating. Microsoft products are one of the most actively used and as a result have many attackers working tirelessly to find and exploit vulnerabilities.
Patch: Patch the Operating Systems of all affected devices and review the affected products list for any other products which could be vulnerable. If so, refer to the MSRC update guide for specific information on patching the vulnerabilities.
Ensure proper cadence: These vulnerabilities should be patched promptly as there are two actively exploited zero days.
Test: It is paramount to test these patches before launching to all users if you are within an organization. Operating System changes can have a significant impact on day-to-day operations.
Rollback: Have a rollback plan in place to ensure that an update will not break the production environment.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/
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