Microsoft Patch Tuesday – Major Flaws In Office, Exchange And SQL Server

Microsoft published its March 2024 Patch Tuesday, which addressed almost 59 vulnerabilities in its products and none of them were Zero-day or publicly known vulnerabilities.

Out of the newly released patches, two are classified as Critical and 57 are classified as Important in severity.

The vulnerabilities in Skype, Microsoft Components for Android, Microsoft Windows and Windows Components, Office and Office Components, Azure,.NET Framework and Visual Studio, SQL Server, Windows Hyper-V, and Microsoft Dynamics have all been addressed.

The release will also include several Chromium issues in addition to the new CVEs. Considering that this is the final patch cycle before the Pwn2Own competition next week, this is a rather low volume for March.

Critical Vulnerabilities Addressed

CVE-2024-21408- Windows Hyper-V Denial Of Service Vulnerability

With a CVSS base score of 5.5, this bug is classified as Critical and has the potential to cause Denial of Service.

A Windows Hyper-V denial-of-service vulnerability can enable an attacker to attack a host device from within a virtual machine (VM).

However, Microsoft did not provide any further information about how this denial-of-service might happen.

CVE-2024-21407 Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

This critical issue is tracked as CVE-2024-21407, a remote code execution in Hyper-V with a CVSS base score of 8.1. 

An attacker within the VM environment might remotely execute code on the host device by submitting carefully constructed file operation requests to the hardware resources on the virtual machine.

“Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to gather information specific to the environment and take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment,” reads the security updates published by Microsoft.

Other Vulnerabilities Addressed

This release has 18 vulnerabilities that may be used to allow remote code execution and 24 vulnerabilities that may allow privilege elevation.

The Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-26198, is one of the notable vulnerabilities. 

A specially constructed file must be stored in a local network location or an online directory to carry out this attack. This file loads the malicious DLL when the victim launches it.

Furthermore, the Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service Confidential Container is tracked under CVE-2024-21400.

“Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to prepare the target environment to improve exploit reliability”, Microsoft.

Here is the complete list of patched vulnerabilities, which provides detailed information about the exploitation methods, vulnerability descriptions, and other information.

All users should update their products to the latest version to prevent threat actors from exploiting these vulnerabilities.

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