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Rapid 7 - Patch Tuesday - October 2022
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The October batch of CVEs published by Microsoft includes 96 vulnerabilities, including 12 fixed earlier this month that affect the Chromium project used by their Edge browser.
Top of mind for many this month is whether Microsoft would patch the two Exchange Server zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082) disclosed at the end of September. While Microsoft was relatively quick to acknowledge the vulnerabilities and provide mitigation steps, their guidance has continually changed as the recommended rules to block attack traffic get bypassed. This whack-a-mole approach seems likely to continue until a proper patch addressing the root causes is available; unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that will be happening today. Thankfully, the impact should be more limited than 2021’s ProxyShell and ProxyLogon vulnerabilities due to attackers needing to be authenticated to the server for successful exploitation. Reports are also surfacing about an additional zero-day distinct from these being used in ransomware attacks; however, these have not yet been substantiated.
Microsoft did address two other zero-day vulnerabilities with today’s patches. CVE-2022-41033, an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability affecting the COM+ Event System Service in all supported versions of Windows, has been seen exploited in the wild. CVE-2022-41043 is an Information Disclosure vulnerability affecting Office for Mac that was publicly disclosed but not (yet) seen exploited in the wild.
Nine CVEs categorized as Remote Code Execution (RCE) with Critical severity were also patched today – seven of them affect the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, and like those fixed last month, require an attacker to win a race condition to exploit them. CVE-2022-38048 affects all supported versions of Office, and CVE-2022-41038 could allow an attacker authenticated to SharePoint to execute arbitrary code on the server, provided the account has “Manage List” permissions.
Maxing out the CVSS base score with a 10.0 this month is CVE-2022-37968, an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster Connect component. It’s unclear why Microsoft has assigned such a high score, given that an attacker would need to know the randomly generated external DNS endpoint for an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster (arguably making the Attack Complexity “High”). That said, if this condition is met then an unauthenticated user could become a cluster admin and potentially gain control over the Kubernetes cluster. Users of Azure Arc and Azure Stack Edge should check whether auto-updates are turned on, and if not, upgrade manually as soon as possible.
Eric Howes , KnowBe4 Principal Lab Researcher, found out about another insidious bad guy trick: " If you work in IT there has undoubtedly come a dark moment when you wondered to yourself just who among your employee users would be gullible enough to click through a phishing email and potentially bring down your organization. from KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/when-users-add-their-names-to-a-wall-of-shame
Lead Analysts: Jeewan Singh Jalal, Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran and Anand Bodke KnowBe4 Threat Labs has detected a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting North American businesses and professionals. This attack compromises Microsoft 365 accounts (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive) by abusing the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant flow, bypassing strong passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). The victim is directed to the legitimate Microsoft domain ( microsoft.com/devicelogin ) portal to enter an attack-supplied device code. This action authenticates the victim and issues a valid OAuth access token to the attacker’s application. The real-time theft of these tokens grants the attacker persistent access to the victim’s Microsoft 365 accounts and corporate data. from Human Risk Management Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/uncovering-the-sophisticated-phishing-campaign-bypassing-m365-mfa
Cybersecurity today is less about single attacks and more about chains of small weaknesses that connect into big risks. One overlooked update, one misused account, or one hidden tool in the wrong hands can be enough to open the door. The news this week shows how attackers are mixing methods—combining stolen access, unpatched software, and clever tricks to move from small entry points to large from The Hacker News https://thehackernews.com/2025/09/weekly-recap-whatsapp-0-day-docker-bug.html
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