Microsoft Patches Privilege Escalation Flaws Disclosed by ‘SandboxEscaper’

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for June 2019 resolve nearly 90 vulnerabilities, including the privilege escalation flaws disclosed recently by a researcher known as SandboxEscaper.

Over the past year, SandboxEscaper has identified several flaws in Windows and publicly disclosed their details, often without notifying Microsoft, apparently out of frustration with the vulnerability reporting process. Some of the disclosed flaws ended up being exploited in attacks.

The researcher last month disclosed four privilege escalation vulnerabilities dubbed bearlpe (CVE-2019-1069), InstallerBypass (CVE-2019-0973), CVE-2019-0841-BYPASS (CVE-2019-1064) and sandboxescape (CVE-2019-1053). The security holes, for which exploits have been made available, impact components such as the Task Scheduler, the AppX Deployment Service (AppXSVC), the Installer, and Shell.

Microsoft has assigned them an “important” severity rating and three of the flaws have an exploitation assessment of “exploitation more likely.” Two of the flaws impact only Windows 10 and other more recent versions, while the other two affect older versions of the operating system as well.

Of all the security holes fixed this month, 21 have been rated critical. They affect Windows and Microsoft’s web browsers, and they can lead to information disclosure or remote code execution.

Two of the “important” vulnerabilities impact the NTLM authentication protocol. These weaknesses were reported to Microsoft by several researchers, including from Preempt, which has published a blog post describing the flaws.

None of the vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft this month appear to have been exploited in the wild.

Microsoft has also published an advisory for an issue that affects the Bluetooth version of FIDO Security Keys. The problem is related to a misconfiguration that allows an attacker in proximity of the targeted security key to communicate with the device.

Last month, users were informed that Google Titan and Feitian-branded security keys were being replaced due to this. Microsoft reported the issue to Google.

Adobe’s Patch Tuesday updates for this month patch critical arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in the company’s Flash Player, ColdFusion and Campaigns products.

Related: Microsoft Reminds Users to Patch Wormable ‘BlueKeep’ Vulnerability

Related: Microsoft Patches Internet Explorer Zero-Day Reported by Google

Related: Microsoft Patches Windows Privilege Escalation Flaws Exploited in Attacks