Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for November address more than 50 vulnerabilities, including 20 critical flaws affecting the company’s web browsers.
A total of 53 CVE identifiers have been assigned to the security bugs addressed by Microsoft this month. None of them appear to have been exploited in attacks before the company released the patches.
Three of the flaws have already been publicly disclosed. These are a browser memory corruption that can lead to code execution (CVE-2017-11827), an information disclosure issue in ASP.NET (CVE-2017-8700), and an information disclosure bug in Internet Explorer (CVE-2017-11848).
A total of 20 critical vulnerabilities have been addressed this month and they all affect Internet Explorer and/or Edge. The security holes exist due to the way the browsers, particularly the scripting engines they use, handle objects in memory.
The vulnerabilities can be exploited for arbitrary code execution by getting the targeted user to access a specially crafted website via the vulnerable web browser.
These critical flaws were reported to Microsoft by independent researchers and employees of Palo Alto Networks, Qihoo 360, Google, and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Many of the security holes were found by the Google Project Zero researcher known as Lokihardt and their details will likely be made public by Google in the upcoming period.
Other vulnerabilities patched this month by Microsoft include important severity denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation bugs in ASP.NET, a Device Guard security feature bypass, information disclosure and security feature bypass issues in Edge, Office memory corruptions, and information disclosure, privilege escalation and DoS flaws in Windows.
Microsoft has also updated Adobe Flash Player components. Adobe has addressed a total of 80 vulnerabilities across nine products, including five critical out-of-bounds read and use-after-free vulnerabilities in Flash Player that can be exploited for remote code execution.
Last month, both Microsoft and Adobe patched zero-day vulnerabilities exploited by threat actors to deliver malware.
Related: Microsoft Patches Zero-Day, Many Other Flaws