Researchers disclose five Microsoft Windows zero-days

Pierluigi Paganini May 20, 2020

Security experts have disclosed five unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, four of which rated as high-risk severity.

Security experts from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) have published information on five unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows.

Four vulnerabilities are classified as high-risk severity, three of them are zero-day vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2020-0916, CVE-2020-0986, and CVE-2020-0915. The flaws could allow an attacker to escalate privileges on the affected system, they received a CVSS score of 7.0.

The vulnerabilities affect in the user-mode printer driver host process splwow64.exe, and is caused by the lack of validation for user-supplied input being dereferenced as a pointer. 

The fourth issue affecting the user-mode printer driver host process splwow64.exe, tracked as CVE-2020-0915, is a low severity information disclosure vulnerability.

The issue is caused by the lack of validation of a user-supplied value before being dereferenced as a pointer.

ZDI reported the issue to Microsoft in December 2019, but the tech giant failed to address them with May 2020 Patch Tuesday.

The last zero-day vulnerability disclosed by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the handling of WLAN connection profiles.  

“This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on affected installations of Microsoft Windows. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target system in order to exploit this vulnerability.” reads the advisory published by Trend Micro.

“The specific flaw exists within the user-mode printer driver host process splwow64.exe. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of a user-supplied value prior to dereferencing it as a pointer. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges from low integrity and execute code in the context of the current user at medium integrity.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Microsoft Windows, hacking)

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