Windows Print Spooler Vulnerabilities Increasingly Exploited in Attacks

The number of attacks targeting Windows Print Spooler vulnerabilities has been increasing, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.

Also known as PrintNightmare, the first Windows Print Spooler vulnerability was disclosed at the end of June 2021, with Microsoft rushing emergency patches roughly one week later.

In August 2021, the tech giant confirmed the existence of another PrintNightmare bug, just days after it had released a new set of patches for the Windows Print Spooler utility.

The most well-known Windows Print Spooler vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2021-1675 and CVE-2021-34527, to which the recently discovered CVE-2022-22718 should be added.

What’s more, on Tuesday, Microsoft released patches for four additional security holes in the printer process management utility, namely CVE-2022-29114, CVE-2022-29140, CVE-2022-29104, and CVE-2022-29132.

Also on Tuesday, Kaspersky reported seeing roughly 65,000 attacks targeting the Printer Spooler vulnerabilities between July 2021 and April 2022. Of these, 31,000 attacks were registered between January and April 2022.

“This suggests that vulnerabilities in Windows Print Spooler remain a popular attack route for cybercriminals, which means users need to be aware of any patches and fixes that Microsoft releases,” Kaspersky says.

With the number of attacks still growing, the country that was hit the most between July 2021 and April 2022 was Italy, which received nearly a quarter of detected attacks. Turkey and South Korea were also popular targets.

Over the past four months, however, the largest number of attacks was observed in Austria, France and Slovenia.

“We anticipate a growing number of exploitation attempts to gain access to resources within corporate networks, accompanied by a high-risk of ransomware infection and data theft. Through some of these vulnerabilities, attackers can gain access not only to victims’ data but also to the whole corporate server,” Kaspersky security researcher Alexey Kulaev said.

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