Microsoft March 2020 Patch Tuesday fixes 115 vulnerabilities

Microsoft has released today its monthly roll-up of security updates known as Patch Tuesday. This month, the Redmond-based company patched 115 vulnerabilities, marking this month’s patches as the biggest in the company’s history.

However, despite this month’s pretty bulky release, nobody will be talking about it today.

Instead, they’ll be busy talking about how a Microsoft snafu leaked details online about a yet-to-be-patched SMBv3 vulnerability, that many experts fear could lead to the creation of another EternalBlue-like exploit.

Nevertheless, this month does have its own security updates. Of the 115 bugs Microsoft patched today, 26 have received a rating of Critical, meaning they’re both easy to exploit and will most likely result in a full device compromise if they ever are.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates are delivered as a giant package, so once you agree to install this month’s patches, you get all fixes, all at once.

However, if there’s one vulnerability that’s likely to come under attacks by malware developers, then it’s, without a doubt, CVE-2020-0684.

This is a bug in Windows LNK shortcut files that allows malware to execute code on a system when a malicious LNK file is processed by the Windows OS.

“The attacker could present to the user a removable drive, or remote share, that contains a malicious .LNK file and an associated malicious binary. When the user opens this drive(or remote share) in Windows Explorer, or any other application that parses the .LNK file, the malicious binary will execute code of the attacker’s choice, on the target system,” Microsoft explained.

Based on Microsoft’s description, this bug is a boon for criminal activity, allowing an easy way of planting malware on user devices.

But that’s not all that’s included with this month’s patches. Additional Patch Tuesday information is below, including links to security fixes published by other companies:

Microsoft’s official Security Update Guide portal lists all security updates in a filterable table.
ZDNet has also put together this page listing all security updates on one single place.
Additional analysis of today’s Patch Tuesday is also available from Cisco Talos, ISC SANS, Tenable, Trend Micro, and Trustwave.
Adobe said there will be no security updates this month.
SAP security updates will be detailed here in the coming days.
VMWare security updates will be detailed here in the coming days.
Google Chrome security updates will be released next Tuesday, March 17.
Firefox security updates were released today.
The Android Security Bulletin for March 2020 is detailed here. Patches started rolling out to users’ phones last week.

Source: Information Technologies - zdnet.com