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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the patch-these-75-holes dept.

El Reg reports

The March edition of Patch Tuesday lands just hours before researchers are expected to flaunt their latest and greatest exploits at the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver.

Hopefully nobody was planning to use any of the 75 CVE-listed vulnerabilities Microsoft addressed today, including several for the Edge and Internet Explorer browsers that would allow remote code execution.

The fixed bugs include nine remote code execution (RCE) flaws in the Chakra scripting engine in Edge. Microsoft says the scripting bugs (such as CVE-2018-0874[1]) would allow an infected webpage to run code with the logged-in user's clearance level.

The Edge scripting engine was also the subject of four memory corruption RCE flaws, as well as an information disclosure bug, CVE-2018-0839[1], that allows an attack page to view objects in memory.

Just two of the 75 Microsoft bugs squashed this month have been publicly disclosed. They include an elevation of privilege bug in Exchange (CVE-2018-0940[1]) exploited via email. Dustin Childs of the Zero Day Initiative said that the bug is perfectly set up to facilitate a spear phishing attack.

[1] All content at portal.msrc.microsoft.com is behind scripts. Attempts to have archive.is run the scripts results in a EULA page.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:37PM (8 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:37PM (#654171) Journal

    Oh, my Win7 VM? Whoop-de-stupid-doo, I'll just roll back to a nightly snapshot. Windows has long since proven that it's too insecure and fragile to be installed on the bare metal. If MS is smart, they'll make the user component of Windows 11 or whatever a virtual machine inside a very slim, stripped-down hypervisor and incorporate automatic snapshots into it.

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    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:11PM (5 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:11PM (#654185)

    And that solves what problem? If viewing a webpage allows access to all of the information stored on the machine, including any network shares, rolling back a snapshot accomplishes what?

    Windows and the entire computing philosophy it embodies, which now dominates the industry, must go. Must be declared unsafe at any patch level, with any possible sandboxing, VM or other band aids. Forbidden under pain of cruel and unusual punishment to be connected to any network where important information is dealt with. Not just classified or life critical computing, any information that the disclosure or modification would impact the economy or privacy. It has been decades now where not a day has passed where multiple zero day exploits haven't lurked for any actor with resources to exploit them. Enough. It isn't ever going to get fixed because it can't be fixed. And assuming some new breakthrough permitted fixing the current mess it is mutating at such a rate nobody can even keep up.

    We see the same defective design patterns up and down the stack, from CPUs designed to marketing specs and actual security is an afterthought, to chipset design where multiple microprocessors can be inserted with zero auditing and no way to fix the inevitable problems that WILL arise, defective firmware everywhere and no attempt for anyone anywhere to ever actually know enough about any of it to audit it or fix it if a defect is discovered. Then the operating systems are defective by design, all patterned on the defective DOS/Windows patterns, it is quickly infecting Linux too; systemd. It impacts the stack above too. "Office" type crap where pretty much every document hosts executable content. Who thought that was a good idea? And the top layer, the modern Internet, is a frigging nightmare of stupidity that space forbids the enumeration of even the most stupid ideas.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:42PM (4 children)

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:42PM (#654229) Journal

      Eh, I only ever use the VM a couple hours a month to run my MIDI sequencer, so no big deal if it gets pwn3d, really. Still, less for security purposes than for purposes of "shit, dad downloaded something bad off that porn site again" I think we should have snapshots integrated right into the OS and the OS should be virtualized.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:23PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:23PM (#654238)

        i expected someone else to make your original comment. you are better than that sort of arrogance through ignorance! but i guess if you didnt know... well ignorance is better than arrogance, because ignorance can be cured.

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:10AM (2 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:10AM (#654331) Journal

          Look, I know virtualization isn't a panacea. You think I haven't been keeping track of all the hypervisor escapes and such for the last few years? But it's better than nothing, and I already had a policy in place of never letting that VM talk to any other node or have anything more important than, say, my arrangement of the Kirby's Dreamland 3 deep-water stages' BGM on it.

          It's like NAT. NAT is not a firewall. By itself, it doesn't add much security. But it *is* handy to have your devices not directly accessible from the WAN side, and that alone provides a passive layer of protection that's better than nothing. Same with virtualization for Windows OSes.

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          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:15PM (1 child)

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:15PM (#654539) Journal

            I think at least one of his points was that when they've copied your bank account access data, restoring from backup doesn't solve the problem.

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            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
            • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:33PM

              by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:33PM (#654542) Journal

              Well, yes, which is why I don't do anything of any importance on the VM. It's just for making music.

              --
              I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:32PM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:32PM (#654188)

    According to VMWare ( https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52245 [vmware.com] ) you need guest, host and hw microcode patches to mitigate Meltdown/Spectre style speculative attacks. Or in other words, you still need to trust Microsoft and Intel to do their job and do it well. Which to me, defeats the purpose of running Windows in a VM in the first place compared to a separate, dedicated machine (or not at all).

    To spice it up:

    Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits.

    You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it.

    x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

    You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

    You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty colours, and you've bought it.

    That's all x86 virtualization is.

    https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582 [marc.info]

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    compiling...
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by arslan on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:24PM

      by arslan (3462) on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:24PM (#654606)

      Great quote! Now if someone can write me something similar with regards to containers! I've been trying to warn folks that putting yet another layer of virtualization on top of your virtualization is rather stupid - especially so if the argument is to simplify the app by shrink wrapping it in a container so the ugly innards are hidden.. I'd rather they just rewrite the app properly.

      Not that containers don't have its place, but it seems to have open up this whole new world for lazy ass engineers to impress their PHB.