83 vulnerabilities have been patched on Microsoft’s first Patch Tuesday of 2021. The patches addressed 10 major flaws, including a zero-day remote code execution bug in Microsoft Defender. 73 of the fixes are classified important and one is publicly known. The fixes addressed Microsoft Windows, the Edge search browser, ChakraCore, Office, Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, Microsoft Malware Protection, Visual Studio, ASP .NET, .NET core and Azure.
The number of vulnerabilities is up 59% from the 49 from January of 2020. CVE-2021-1647 is the bug in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine that is widely known. The attacker can access the network remotely through SSH, by accessing the machine directly or by having the user act in a way which would trigger the bug. The attack would not require specialized conditions to exploit the bug and the privileges needed are the same that would be used to provide basic user capabilities. This bug and patch come after Microsoft confirmed its network was affected by the SolarWinds breach in software updates. Many users would have received the patch for the bug as the default setting for businesses and individuals have their Malware Protection Engine automatically updated. The month’s bugs patched primarily were affecting the operating system, browser and malware protection.
Read more: Microsoft Defender Zero-Day Fixed in First Patch Tuesday of 2021
