Patch Tuesday - August 2022

It's the week of Hacker Summer Camp in Las Vegas, and Microsoft has published fixes for 141 separate vulnerabilities in their swath of August updates. This is a new monthly record by raw CVE count, but from a patching perspective, the numbers are slightly less dire. 20 CVEs affect their Chromium-based Edge browser, and 34 affect Azure Site Recovery (up from 32 CVEs affecting that product last month). As usual, OS-level updates will address a lot of these, but note that some extra configuration is required to fully protect Exchange Server this month.

There is one 0-day being patched this month. CVE-2022-34713 is a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting the Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) – it carries a CVSSv3 base score of 7.8, as it requires convincing a potential victim to open a malicious file. The advisory indicates that this CVE is a variant of the “Dogwalk” vulnerability, which made news alongside Follina (CVE-2022-30190) back in May.

Publicly disclosed, but not (yet) exploited is CVE-2022-30134, an Information Disclosure vulnerability affecting Exchange Server. In this case, simply patching is not sufficient to protect against attackers being able to read targeted email messages. Administrators should enable Extended Protection in order to fully remediate this vulnerability, as well as the five other vulnerabilities affecting Exchange this month. Details about how to accomplish this are available via the Exchange Blog.

Microsoft also patched several flaws affecting Remote Access Server (RAS). The most severe of these (CVE-2022-30133 and CVE-2022-35744) are related to Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol and could allow RCE simply by sending a malicious connection request to a server. Seven CVEs affecting the Windows Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) on RAS were also fixed this month: six RCEs and one Denial of Service. If you have RAS in your environment but are unable to patch immediately, consider blocking traffic on port 1723 from your network.

Vulnerabilities affecting Windows Network File System (NFS) have been trending in recent months, and today sees Microsoft patching CVE-2022-34715 (RCE, CVSS 9.8) affecting NFSv4.1 on Windows Server 2022.

This is the worst of it. One last vulnerability to highlight: CVE-2022-35797 is a Security Feature Bypass in Windows Hello – Microsoft’s biometric authentication mechanism for Windows 10. Successful exploitation requires physical access to a system, but would allow an attacker to bypass a facial recognition check.

Summary charts

Summary tables

Azure vulnerabilities

Browser vulnerabilities

Developer Tools vulnerabilities

ESU Windows vulnerabilities

Exchange Server vulnerabilities

Microsoft Office vulnerabilities

System Center Azure vulnerabilities

Windows vulnerabilities