Security Advisory
UCLA has recently learned that some members of the UCLA community are receiving emails from financial institutions named Chime and Go2Bank. These emails may come in different forms and under a variety of subject lines. Some of the identified subject lines are:
Please be advised of a critical, zero-day exploit, termed PrintNightmare, discovered in the Windows Print Spooler service that can result in privilege escalation and remote code execution when exploited. This can result in the full compromise of a system, and if leveraged against a domain controller, can be used to take control of the entire domain and propagate malware throughout the network.
Microsoft has released additional security patches related to Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. These patches address additional vulnerabilities which could also allow remote code execution. Please see the updated Microsoft Tech Community article for more information.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued warning of an ongoing IRS-impersonation scam targeting educational institutes, primarily students/staff who have a “.edu” email address. The phishing email appears to target individuals affiliated with education in all formats including public and private, profit and non-profit institutions.
As we focus on research around COVID-19, cybercriminals are focused on targeting researchers. The newest attack involves a fraudulent request for an interview with a well-known New Yorker columnist, Atul Gawande. From early reports, after initial contact, it seems the cybercriminals start a back and forth communication with anyone who responds. The attacker may even set up a phone conversation but ultimately, they send a malicious Microsoft Teams-like link.
Of the 120 bugs, Microsoft ranked 17 as “critical” and 103 as “important” vulnerabilities.
Five of the critical bugs (CVE-2020-1554, CVE-2020-1492, CVE-2020-1379, CVE-2020-1477 and CVE-2020-1525) are tied to Microsoft’s Windows Media Foundation (WMF), a multimedia framework and infrastructure platform for handling digital media in Windows 7 through Windows 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2019. August’s bugs bring the number of critical bugs to ten, points out Allan Liska, senior security architect at Recorded Future.
Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC) provides authentication for user and computer accounts in Windows active directory domain. A vulnerability in Netlogon Remote Protocol enables an unauthenticated attacker to impersonate a domain-joined computer and obtain domain administrator privileges.
The impact of this vulnerability is high.