Microsoft on Tuesday launched security updates to handle 57 security vulnerabilities in its software program, together with a whopping six zero-days that it stated have been actively exploited within the wild.
Of the 56 flaws, six are rated Vital, 50 are rated Essential, and one is rated Low in severity. Twenty-three of the addressed vulnerabilities are distant code execution bugs and 22 relate to privilege escalation.
The updates are along with 17 vulnerabilities Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser because the launch of final month’s Patch Tuesday replace, considered one of which is a spoofing flaw particular to the browser (CVE-2025-26643, CVSS rating: 5.4).
The six vulnerabilities which have come beneath energetic exploitation are listed beneath –
- CVE-2025-24983 (CVSS rating: 7.0) – A Home windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability that permits a licensed attacker to raise privileges domestically
- CVE-2025-24984 (CVSS rating: 4.6) – A Home windows NTFS data disclosure vulnerability that permits an attacker with bodily entry to a goal machine and the flexibility to plug in a malicious USB drive to probably learn parts of heap reminiscence
- CVE-2025-24985 (CVSS rating: 7.8) – An integer overflow vulnerability in Home windows Quick FAT File System Driver that permits an unauthorized attacker to execute code domestically
- CVE-2025-24991 (CVSS rating: 5.5) – An out-of-bounds learn vulnerability in Home windows NTFS that permits a licensed attacker to reveal data domestically
- CVE-2025-24993 (CVSS rating: 7.8) – A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in Home windows NTFS that permits an unauthorized attacker to execute code domestically
- CVE-2025-26633 (CVSS rating: 7.0) – An improper neutralization vulnerability in Microsoft Administration Console that permits an unauthorized attacker to bypass a security characteristic domestically
ESET, which is credited with discovering and reporting CVE-2025-24983, stated it first found the zero-day exploit within the wild in March 2023 and delivered through a backdoor named PipeMagic on compromised hosts.
“The vulnerability is a use-after-free in Win32k driver,” the Slovakian firm famous. “In a sure state of affairs achieved utilizing the WaitForInputIdle API, the W32PROCESS construction will get dereferenced yet one more time than it ought to, inflicting UAF. To achieve the vulnerability, a race situation have to be gained.”
PipeMagic, first found in 2022, is a plugin-based trojan that has focused entities in Asia and Saudi Arabia, with the malware distributed within the type of a faux OpenAI ChatGPT software in late 2024 campaigns.
“One in every of distinctive options of PipeMagic is that it generates a 16-byte random array to create a named pipe within the format .pipe1.<hex string>,” Kaspersky revealed in October 2024. “It spawns a thread that repeatedly creates this pipe, reads knowledge from it, after which destroys it.”
“This pipe is used for receiving encoded payloads, cease alerts through the default native interface. PipeMagic often works with a number of plugins downloaded from a command-and-control (C2) server, which, on this case, was hosted on Microsoft Azure.”
The Zero Day Initiative famous that CVE-2025-26633 stems from how MSC recordsdata are dealt with, permitting an attacker to evade file popularity protections and execute code within the context of the present consumer. The exercise has been linked to a risk actor tracked as EncryptHub (aka LARVA-208).
Action1 identified that risk actors may chain the 4 vulnerabilities affecting core Home windows file system elements to trigger distant code execution (CVE-2025-24985 and CVE-2025-24993) and data disclosure (CVE-2025-24984 and CVE-2025-24991). All of the 4 bugs had been reported anonymously.
“Particularly, the exploit depends on the attacker crafting a malicious VHD file and convincing a consumer to open or mount a VHD file,” Kev Breen, senior director of risk analysis at Immersive, stated. “VHDs are Digital Laborious Disks and are sometimes related to storing the working system for digital machines.”
“While they’re extra sometimes related to Digital Machines, we’ve got seen examples through the years the place risk actors use VHD or VHDX recordsdata as a part of phishing campaigns to smuggle malware payloads previous AV options. Relying on the configuration of Home windows programs, merely double-clicking on a VHD file might be sufficient to mount the container and, subsequently, execute any payloads contained inside the malicious file.”
In keeping with Satnam Narang, senior employees analysis engineer at Tenable, CVE-2025-26633 is the second flaw in MMC to be exploited within the wild as a zero-day after CVE-2024-43572 and CVE-2025-24985 is the primary vulnerability within the Home windows Quick FAT File System Driver since March 2022. It is also the primary to be exploited within the wild as a zero-day.
As is customary, it is presently not recognized the remaining vulnerabilities are being exploited, in what context, and the precise scale of the assaults. The event has prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company (CISA) so as to add them to the Recognized Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal companies to use the fixes by April 1, 2025.
Software program Patches from Different Distributors
Along with Microsoft, security updates have additionally been launched by different distributors over the previous a number of weeks to rectify a number of vulnerabilities, together with —
