Microsoft Patch Tuesday, January 2021 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug more than 80 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including one that is actively being exploited and another which was disclosed prior to today. Ten of the flaws earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, meaning they could be exploited by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over unpatched systems with little or no interaction from Windows users. Most concerning of this month's batch is probably a critical bug (CVE-2021-1647) in Microsoft's default anti-malware suite — Windows Defender — that is seeing active exploitation. Microsoft recently stopped providing a great deal of detail in their vulnerability advisories, so it's not entirely clear how this is being exploited. But Kevin Breen, director of research at Immersive Labs, says depending on the vector the flaw could be trivial to exploit. "It could be as simple as sending a file," he said. "The user doesn't need to interact with anything, as Defender will access it as soon as it is placed on the system." Fortunately, this bug is probably already patched by Microsoft on end-user systems, as the company continuously updates Defender outside of the normal monthly patch cycle. Breen called attention to another critical vulnerability this month — CVE-2020-1660 — which is a remote code execution flaw in nearly every version of Windows that earned a CVSS score of 8.8 (10 is the most dangerous). "They classify this vulnerability as ‘low'…

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