Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for July 2018 address more than 50 vulnerabilities, but none of them appear to have been exploited for malicious purposes before the fixes were released.
The company has classified 18 of the flaws as critical and, similar to previous months, they mostly affect the Edge and Internet Explorer web browsers. Many of these security holes have been described as memory corruption bugs that allow remote code execution.
Three of the flaws patched this month were publicly disclosed before Microsoft released patches. The list includes CVE-2018-8278, a spoofing vulnerability affecting Edge; and CVE-2018-8314 and CVE-2018-8313, both of which are Windows privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has highlighted some of the more interesting flaws patched this month. One of them is a low severity Office tampering issue that can be exploited by getting the targeted user to open a specially crafted file.
“An attacker exploiting this vulnerability could embed untrusted TrueType fonts into an email. Bugs in fonts have been popular since 2013 and have been used in malware attacks in the past. This bug could allow them to spread and possibly even bypass traditional filters. That’s likely the reason Microsoft chose to go ahead and release a patch for this Low-rated vulnerability,” ZDI explained in a blog post.
Another interesting vulnerability that is not very serious affects the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter (MWDA). The flaw allows an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands, but what makes the issue interesting is the fact that a firmware update is required to address it.
“To get the new firmware, it has to be downloaded from the Wireless Display Adapter App available in the Microsoft App Store. That doesn’t sound like something easily automated. From a sysadmin’s perspective, this patch will be very labor intensive to roll out,” ZDI said.
Microsoft also made some updates to advisories describing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, including to inform users of a new Spectre variant.
Adobe’s Patch Tuesday updates resolve more than 100 vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader, including tens of critical memory corruption bugs that can allow remote code execution. The company has also released security updates for Flash Player, Experience Manager, and Connect.
Related: Microsoft Patches 11 Critical RCE Flaws in Windows, Browsers
Related: Microsoft Patches Two Windows Zero-Day Vulnerabilities
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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