Microsoft Issues Patches for 2 Bugs Exploited as Zero-Day in the Wild

Microsoft today released the latest batch of software security
updates for all supported versions of its Windows operating systems
and other products that patch a total of 113 new security
vulnerabilities, 17 of which are critical and 96 rated important in
severity.

Most importantly, two of the security
flaws have been reported as being publicly known at the time of
release, and the other two are being actively exploited in the wild
by hackers.
^[1]

One of the publicly disclosed flaws, which was also exploited as
zero-day, resides in the Adobe Font Manager Library used by
Windows, the existence of which Microsoft revealed last month
within an early security warning for its millions of users.

Tracked as CVE-2020-1020^[2], the remote code
execution vulnerability exists in Microsoft Windows when the
Windows Adobe Type Manager Library improperly handles a
specially-crafted multi-master font – Adobe Type 1 PostScript
format.

As explained in the previous
post^[3], the affected font
library not only parses content when open with a 3rd-party software
but used by Windows Explorer to display the content of a file in
the ‘Preview Pane’ or ‘Details Pane’ without having users to open
it.

The second in-the-wild exploited remote code execution flaw
(CVE-2020-0938^[4]) also resides in the
Adobe Type Manager Library that triggers when parsing a malicious
OpenType font.

Both of these zero-day flaws were reported^[5] to Microsoft in the last
week of Match by researchers working with Google Google Project but
with a very short full disclosure deadline, which was then mutually
extended considering the current global circumstances.

Besides this, the second publicly known issue, which was not
exploited, is an important severity elevation of privilege
vulnerability (CVE-2020-0935^[6]) that resides in the
OneDrive for Windows desktop.

Other than these, 5 critical flaws affect Microsoft Office
SharePoint, 4 of which exists due to the failure of the software to
check the source markup of an application package, allowing remote
attackers to execute arbitrary code on the affected
machines.

Whereas the 5th flaw in Microsoft Office SharePoint is a
cross-site-scripting (XSS) vulnerability (CVE-2020-0927)
that can be exploited by an authenticated attacker by sending a
specially crafted request to an affected SharePoint server.

Another notable critical flaw (CVE-2020-0910) affects
Windows Hyper-V, enabling a guest virtual machine to compromise the
hypervisor, escaping from a guest virtual machine to the host, or
escaping from one guest virtual machine to another guest virtual
machine.

Windows users and system administrators are highly advised to
apply the latest security patches as soon as possible in an attempt
to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of
their computers.

For installing the latest Windows security updates, you can head
on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for
updates on your PC, or you can install the updates
manually.