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Nine words to ruin your Monday: Emergency Internet Explorer patch amid in-the-wild attacks

Microsoft today issued a rare emergency security update for Internet Explorer to address a critical flaw in the browser that's being exploited right now in the wild.

Redmond says the vulnerability, a scripting-engine memory-corruption bug designated CVE-2019-1367, can be abused by a malicious webpage or email to achieved remote code execution: that means Windows PCs can be hijacked by viewing a suitably booby-trapped website, or message, when using Internet Explorer. Malware, spyware, and other software nasties can be injected to run on the computer, in that case.

Discovery of the flaw, and its exploitation in the wild by miscreants to commandeer systems, was attributed to Clément Lecigne of the Google Threat Analysis Group. The programming blunder is present in at least IE 9 to 11.

Such flaws are not uncommon, and Microsoft typically patches anywhere from 10-20 browser and scripting engine remote code execution each month with the Patch Tuesday bundle. Because they allow remote code execution with little or no user warning or interaction, Redmond considers such bugs to be critical security risks.

In this case, the severity of the flaw combined with the fact that vulnerability is being actively targeted has prompted Microsoft to break its normal patch cycle and release the update today, rather than wait until October 8 when the next Patch Tuesday drop is due to arrive.

[...] Microsoft also dropped a fix for a less-severe denial of service vulnerability in the Windows Defender security tool.

CVE-2019-1255 describes a file-handling error in Defender that will cause the security tool to generate a false positive when scanning an application. An attacker who already has access to the system could abuse the feature to make the tool block some applications.

"An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to prevent legitimate accounts from executing legitimate system binaries," Microsoft said.

Also at: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/microsoft-pushes-patch-of-ie-zeroday-thats-being-actively-exploited/

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