RCE Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Products

This month, Microsoft has released updates to address 129 vulnerabilities, 23 of which are critical. Tenable’s monthly Patch Wednesday roundup examines several of the vulnerabilities, including a crop of RCEs in Microsoft Office products which are particularly concerning as students and teachers begin e-learning. Satnam Narang, Staff Research Engineer at Tenable also comments on some of the severe vulnerabilities.

“For the fourth month in a row, Microsoft has patched over 120 CVEs, addressing 129 CVEs in September including 23 critical-rated vulnerabilities. Some of the most severe vulnerabilities in this month’s release include a pair of remote code execution flaws in Microsoft SharePoint and a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server. CVE-2020-1210 is a vulnerability in SharePoint due to a failure to check an application package’s source markup. To exploit this flaw, an attacker would need to be able to upload a SharePoint application package to a vulnerable SharePoint site. This vulnerability is reminiscent of a similar SharePoint remote code execution flaw, CVE-2019-0604, that has been exploited in the wild by threat actors since at least April 2019.

CVE-2020-1576 is another SharePoint flaw patched this month that’s also similar to CVE-2020-1210.CVE-2020-16875 is a memory corruption vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server due to improper handling of objects in memory. The exploitation of this flaw would simply require an attacker to send a malicious email containing the exploit code to a vulnerable Exchange server. This vulnerability would allow the attacker to run arbitrary code, which could grant them access to create new accounts, access, modify or remove data, and install programs.” – Satnam Narang, Staff Research Engineer at Tenable.

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