IT professionals leave room in their schedules for Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday just as I leave room in my schedule every Wednesday night for blog writing. This month’s Patch Tuesday was light on patches compared to other months but includes six that are designed to patch zero day-related vulnerabilities, four of which are relevant to the elevation of privilege flaws.

No question, the ability of threat actors to escalate privileges in a system or application is a major concern for data security, as it may allow threat actors to access and exfiltrate the most sensitive data in a company’s system. It also may give the threat actor the ability to destroy backup systems and security tools designed to detect compromises and plant malware and ransomware unseen. This is exactly what threat actors are doing with Prometheus ransomware [view related post].

Microsoft urged users to patch these zero-day vulnerabilities, as threat actors are using the vulnerabilities to launch targeted attacks against users.