Microsoft's October 2024 Patch Tuesday Fixes 5 Zero-Days, 118 Flaws in total

Microsoft’s October 2024 Patch Tuesday updates address 118 security vulnerabilities, including five zero-day flaws.

All of these vulnerabilities happen across different platforms, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Visual Studio, Azure CLI, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Windows Storage, Windows Remote Desktop, DeepSpeed, and various components of Windows 10, 11, and Windows Server

• 3 vulnerabilities are critical
• 108 are important
• 7 are low-severity

The three critical flaws are all remote code execution vulnerabilities, which, if exploited, could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on your device. They include remote code execution bugs, elevation of privilege flaws, denial of service issues, spoofing vulnerabilities, and security feature bypass bugs. Thus, installing the October 2024 Patch Tuesday updates becomes essential, and it should be done ASAP.

Microsoft also fixed a critical zero-day RCE vulnerability in the Microsoft Management Console (MSC), a Windows component used to create, save, and open administrative tools called consoles, such as the Device Manager or the Event Viewer. The zero-day, tracked as CVE-2024-43572, could be exploited by an attacker to execute code on your device by convincing you to open a specially crafted malicious MSC file. The Redmond-based tech giant confirmed it had been exploited in the wild.

Another actively exploited zero-day is a Windows MSHTML platform spoofing vulnerability identified as CVE-2024-43573.

The MSHTML platform is part of Microsoft’s Trident engine, previously used by Internet Explorer and the old version of Microsoft Edge. Although Microsoft has retired both browsers, the company continues to support some of its components in the new Edge.

Other zero-days addressed by Microsoft in the October 2024 Patch Tuesday updates include:

• CVE-2024-20659: A UEFI security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows Hyper-V.
• CVE-2024-43583: A Windows Winlogon elevation of privilege vulnerability that could be exploited to give an attacker system privileges. This bug requires the presence of a first-party Microsoft IME to be fixed.
• CVE-2024-6197: A remote code execution vulnerability in libcurl, the popular open-source client-side URL transfer library, fixed in Windows’ bundled version of the tool.

To install the October 2024 Patch Tuesday security updates, visit Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and click the Check for updates button.

Take a look at the complete list of security flaws addressed with October 2024 Patch Tuesday updates:

In other news, the October 2024 Patch Tuesday updates are also the first released to Windows 11 24H2, which still doesn’t fix the ongoing Roblox issue. Windows 10 has also received them, although some versions of this operating system are no longer eligible for Patch Tuesday updates.