Intel on Tuesday announced the release of updates that patch tens of vulnerabilities across many of the company’s software and hardware products.
The chipmaker’s Patch Tuesday updates for February 2021 were described in 19 advisories, including four that cover high-severity vulnerabilities.
The list of high-severity flaws includes a privilege escalation issue in the Intel Solid State Drive (SSD) Toolbox, and a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw in the XMM 7360 Cell Modem that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker who has network access.
In its graphics drivers, Intel patched nearly two dozen vulnerabilities, including five high-severity bugs that can be exploited by authenticated attackers — four of them allow privilege escalation and one can be exploited for DoS attacks.
Intel also informed customers about five vulnerabilities in Server Board, Server System and Compute Modules Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) products, including two high-severity privilege escalation issues.
Medium-severity vulnerabilities have been patched in RealSense Depth Camera Manager (DCM), Ethernet I210 Controller series network adapters, Trace Analyzer and Collector, SOC Driver Package for STK1A32SC, Ethernet E810 adapter drivers for Linux and Windows, 722 Ethernet controllers, Software Guard Extensions (SGX), Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), Quartus Prime software, PROSet/Wireless WiFi and Killer drivers for Windows 10, Enhance Privacy ID (EPID) SDK, Server Board Onboard Video driver for Windows, Collaboration Suite for WebRTC, and the Optane DC Persistent Memory installer for Windows.
These security holes can lead to privilege escalation, DoS attacks and information disclosure, but exploitation in many cases requires a privileged user and local access.
Software and firmware updates have been released by Intel to patch these vulnerabilities. Intel has replaced SSD Toolbox with the Memory and Storage (MAS) tool, so SSD Toolbox will not be updated to patch the high-severity privilege escalation flaw.
Many of the vulnerabilities disclosed this week were discovered by Intel employees.
Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for February 2021 fix over 50 vulnerabilities, including an actively exploited Windows kernel flaw. Adobe has also addressed more than 50 security holes, including a Reader vulnerability that has been exploited in limited attacks against Windows users.
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