Pierluigi Paganini
October 15, 2014
Microsoft has released eight security bulletins on Tuesday as part of October 2014 Patch Tuesday, they fix dozens of vulnerabilities including the widely discussed zero-day flaw exploited by the Russian group of hackers Sandworm in a cyber espionage campaign that targeted government entities including NATO and Ukraine institutions.
” The vulnerability has been classified with the code CVE-2014-4114, and according the revelation made by iSIGHT is has been exploited in cyber espionage operation on a large scale by a Russia hacking team, the nature of the target and the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) adopted lead the experts to believe that this is the work of state-sponsored hackers.”
The patch also fixes a pair of zero-day Windows vulnerabilities that attackers have been exploiting to compromised major corporations’ networks, the two zero-day vulnerabilities have been identified by researchers at FireEye, which uncovered the limited and targeted attacks.
The two zero-days discovered by the FireEye team are rated as critical and are patched as part of MS14-058 and. They are designated CVE-2014-4148 and CVE-2014-4113.
“Both zero-days exploit the Windows Kernel, with Microsoft assigning CVE-2014-4148 and CVE-2014-4113 to and addressing the vulnerabilities in their October 2014 Security Bulletin. FireEye Labs have identified 16 total zero-day attacks in the last two years – uncovering 11 in 2013 and five in 2014 so far.”
“In the case of CVE-2014-4148, the attackers exploited a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows TrueType Font (TTF) processing subsystem, using a Microsoft Office document to embed and deliver a malicious TTF to an international organization. Since the embedded TTF is processed in kernel-mode, successful exploitation granted the attackers kernel-mode access. Though the TTF is delivered in a Microsoft Office document, the vulnerability does not reside within Microsoft Office.” states a blog post from FireEye.
“CVE-2014-4113 rendered Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003/R2, and Windows Server 2008/R2 vulnerable to a local Elevation of Privilege (EoP) attack. This means that the vulnerability cannot be used on its own to compromise a customer’s security. An attacker would first need to gain access to a remote system running any of the above operating systems before they could execute code within the context of the Windows Kernel.”
The vulnerabilities fixed by the October 2014 Patch Tuesday address several vulnerabilities in different Microsoft products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, Sharepoint Server and the .Net framework. Three of the bulletins are marked “critical” and rest are “important” in severity. Systems administrators are recommended to apply the patches immediately for the critical updates.
The zero-day flaw (CVE-2014-4114) is patched as part of MS14-060. Microsoft rated Bulletin MS14-060 as important rather than critical because it requires a user to open a Microsoft Office file to trigger the remote code execution. FireEye highlighted that each exploits being used separately in apparently unrelated attack.
“We have no evidence of these exploits being used by the same actors. Instead, we have only observed each exploit being used separately, in unrelated attacks,” FireEye explained.
For more information on the fixed zero-day flaws please refer the official bulletin released by Microsoft.
(Security Affairs – Zero-day, Microsoft)
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