Microsoft's March Patch Tuesday: Critical remote code execution flaws, IE zero-day fixed

[RV_]

Yesterday was Windows update day. There are real vulnerabilities the rest of the bad guys now know about so patch early if you haven't set to auto update like mine.I currently have nine systems one AMD, One with an Atom Z 8350 SoC all with Windows 10 Pro save my newest Surface Pro 7 which came with Windows home? They range from 2014 to currently top of the line for sale. From early Intel Generation 6 - 10th gen on my backup 27" AIO my surface Go. All of them upgraded just fine although it took forever for the Atom to update.

That does not mean it will work on yours, but generally, if all mine worked, it will not kill most computers worldwide.

However if you are slow to update better get this one quick.

Excerpt:

"Microsoft has released 89 security fixes for software including the Edge browser, Office, and Azure that patch critical issues including vectors for the remote execution of arbitrary code. The fixes follow an unscheduled emergency release for Microsoft Exchange Server.

During the tech giant's standard monthly patch round, Microsoft released a slew of patches to fix vulnerabilities in software including Azure, Microsoft Office products -- such as PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint, and Visio -- alongside the Edge browser and Internet Explorer. 

This also includes seven out-of-band fixes for Microsoft Exchange Server which were released last week, four of which are classed as zero-days. 

Security updates have also been issued for features and services including the Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, Windows Admin Center, DirectX, Event Tracing, Registry, Win32K, and Windows Remote Access API. 

n total, 14 are described as critical and the majority lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE), whereas the rest are deemed important.

Among the fixes is the resolution of CVE-2021-26411, a memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being actively exploited in the wild.

"This kind of exploit would give the attacker the same operating system permissions as the user visiting the website," explained Kevin Breen, Director of Cyber Threat Research at Immersive Labs. "So if you're browsing the internet as a standard user, the attacker will get user level access to your filesystem and limited access to the operating system. If you are browsing the internet as an admin, the attackers will get full unrestricted access to your filesystem and the operating system."

Much more hot links and details in the article here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-march-patch-tuesday-critical-remote-code-execution-flaws-fixed/?ftag=TREc64629f&bhid=22078230483476385315599228605251&mid=13293506&cid=2210234375

 

Safe Computing!

Edited March 11, 2021 by RV_

[RV_]

Update now!

[dirtyboots]

Thanks, Derek, always appreciate your reminders!

[RV_]

You are welcome Donna!

[Chalkie]

12 hours ago, RV_ said:

I currently have nine systems ...

Oh, man, just have to ask. What does anyone (well, two counting your wife) need nine computers for? Inquiring minds want to know. 😁

[k4rs]

7 hours ago, Chalkie said:

Oh, man, just have to ask. What does anyone (well, two counting your wife) need nine computers for? Inquiring minds want to know. 😁

I don't think that 9 computers in a household is common, but not rare either.  I have 9 desktops, 3 laptops, and 3 Raspberry Pi computers.  Toni has her own desktop and laptop.  I actually have several others laying around that are not currently in use.  Of course I am a computer geek that worked in the field for years before retiring.  I now do computer support for residents of our RV park.  I'll go into detail if you really wish to know what each is used for.  😃

Safe Travels (or not)...

[Chalkie]

3 hours ago, k4rs said:

I don't think that 9 computers in a household is common, but not rare either.  I have 9 desktops, 3 laptops, and 3 Raspberry Pi computers.

Wow! Are you a full time RVer? I know RV_ is not so I guess he has room to spread out. But even before I retired and we became fulltime RVers I worked in the computer industry and I only had 2 desktops, 1 server, and 2 laptops. Heck, my son-in-law who is a senior server design engineer for a major computer company based in Texas only has an all-in-one, a personal laptop and a work laptop and my daughter only has an iPad. 

I dunno, I just think there is a limit to what is realistically useful for one or two people. That just me and my 2 cents.

[Jim & Alice]

I am a former IT Technical Services Manager, IBM Mainframes, Sun Solaris, AIX, SNA, TCP/IP... and as a retired Full time RV'er I maintain just two Windows environments - a Dell Desktop, and a Dell Laptop (all ssd).   Shucks I don't even have a smart phone.   🙂   But I would never begrudge a good Computer Geek all the electronics he/she would want and enjoy.   And to provide park-wide support is an extremely valuable & considerate thing to do.

[NamMedevac 70]

Thanks RV Derek.

https://www.facebook.com/Pilot-Bill-Perkins-Exotic-Living-And-Travels-in-Far-East-and-SE-Asia-1425108021122523

[Bill Joyce]

My wife and I both have main 15" and 13" laptops.  The 15" are what we use every day and the 13" ones are what we take to the coffee shop and on airplane trips.  I have an old 14" 32-bit laptop dedicated running  VMSPC (https://www.silverleafelectronics.com/node/6 ) to monitor my motorhome diesel engine while traveling.   I also have an old 15" 32-bit laptop as a spare for VMSPC, which I have used once when I had a weird issue with the 14".  Then there is the 15" laptop running Linux, which I do use for certain tasks.  I also have a 15" 720p laptop I carry around that my mother-in-law gave me since she bought a replacement.  That is 8 laptop computers.  Then there is my 8" Android tablet, which I got for "free" from AT&T, but it is feeling slow these days and it might get trashed like the 10" Android tablet it replaced many years ago.  We also booth have smartphones.  

[k4rs]

16 hours ago, Chalkie said:

Wow! Are you a full time RVer?

Not any more.  We spent 13 years on the road full time and now are seasonal travelers (or we were before Covid and hope to be again soon).

While we were full time we had 2 desktops (actually one full size tower and one mini PC) along with 2 laptops.  Now when we travel we take 3 laptops along. 

Safe Travels (or not)...

[Kirk W]

6 hours ago, k4rs said:

While we were full time we had 2 desktops (actually one full size tower and one mini PC) along with 2 laptops.  Now when we travel we take 3 laptops along. 

You sound a lot like my middle son. He isn't full-time but does sometimes travel and work. At home he has a desktop, a laptop, a work laptop, and a tablet. His son & daughter each have a desktop and tablet as well as a laptop from school. His wife has a desktop &a laptop. In addition they have a laptop that is dedicated to their 3D printer and a desktop that is dedicated to their ham radio relay group. Then there are 6 or 7 more older laptops that he reconditioned for his boys that are doing robotics construction, programing and competitions.  That may not be all of them but it is most and of course, Alexa pretty much runs the household.  🙃

[NamMedevac 70]

Just for grins I have at least 5 laptops of different sizes from very new Lenovo I Core 7 to old Acer Vista that I easily upgraded to WIN 10 and it still works great.  Also 8.1 dell, refurbished Dell upgraded to WIN 10 and refurbished Lenovo WIN 7.  All work without flaw and two old ones upgraded to WIN 10 with no glitches and were free upgrades.  

Collected these over a period of 11 or 12 years so I am laptop poor.

Before that I had an Apple I Mac for 3 years and failed me on day after the 3 year warrant expired.  Non apple products have worked very well for me with no failures.

Pilot Bill Perkins Exotic Living And Travels in Far East and S.E. Asia | Facebook

Edited March 13, 2021 by NamMedevac 70

[RV_]

Gary,

I had to go check my stuff and see the model numbers and in the case of my Surface Pro machines I was wrong posting here once before saying my Pro 4 was 16 GB RAM when it was actually 8GB. MY Pro 7 has 16GB. Anyway Gary you asked and I took a couple of hours investigating because I needed to review anyway. Remember Gary I just got here Nov 1st 2019 and barely got out of boxes some when the Pandemic hit. I have a lot of stuff I am not giving to goodwill including brand new items in boxes and other stuff that requires people coming in my house and we are not both finished with our vaccinations. So I needed to review them and see which are going. When we are clear of the pandemic risks here we are having garage sales from hell and using Marketplace and other sales venues.  Anyway I did a write up to answer your question with what each is used for. Here it is:

Yep, I did the Devry Institute Basic electronics course in 1972 and built the Heathkit GR 2000 25" TV that had electronic tuning before you could get electronic tuning TVs in the stores, and built my digital Multimeter, and O-Scope. That gave me the skills to buy all the non-working electronic toys in the classifieds and pawn shops to have things we could not afford as Airmen and  a buck sergeant. Like Roger I did computers on duty (1987) and at home (1984 XT) in the 80s and was an ISP in Germany 1995-1997 in the old Octopus and 50 US Robotics 56k modems screaming in the NOC days, and boy was it hot. I also had a computer store and Satellite store I did installs during the last of the actuator 1 meter dish days, and the beginning of the digital days with small stationary dishes as used here now. with Scandinavian D2Mac and regular British sky receivers and made bootleg cards legally serving the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and American service members in Europe who wanted TV they could understand. Gilligan's Island dubbed into German with German actors is only funny the first time. So I have been in this stuff and many other tech pursuits more for fun than profit the last

1.     HP Compaq Pro. I bought an HP Compaq 6305 Pro refurbished for $115.00 shipped four years ago - HP 6305  Mine has the A8 5500B 3.2 GHz - 12 GB - SSHD Hybrid 1TB Seagate drive and a DVD multi drive. This one is similar. It screams. I put a $3.99 Bluetooth USB adapter and an AC1300 USB wifi dongle. It is very similar to this just more RAM and 1TB drive : HP 6305 I added a drive hot swap bay like this to it: Hot Swap drive bay Newegg sold for 5 bucks shipped. I use it for drive tests and checking my 14 3.5" storage HDDs drives. Four are small 320GB-500GB drives I am going to sell and the rest are 1 TB and 2 TB 3.5" drives. Also six 2.5" drives all 600GB and 1TB I bought external enclosures for, one is a WD 1TB My Passport premade 2.5” external drive. I am selling it cheap for some student who needs a system that is not slow, with a really nice 17" Dell Monitor That has a picture as good as any but my Quad HD (QHD) Touchscreens and 27 Acer QHD Monitor are noticeably better.

I have three AIOs in use.  

2.     My main daily use is a Dell XPS 2720 Quad HD touchscreen AIO. It has a 27" QHD ten point touchscreen, Intel Core i7 4770S quad core processor, 8GB RAM, 32GB mSATA SSD, and a 2TB HDD, and a DVD multi. It has a Thunderbolt port, six USB 3 (four in back two on the left side with the full size SD card port, and the 3.5mm Headphone and mic ports. It has two HDMI port one for input from my Fire TV, and the other an output to attach to a TV and touch controls on the front to switch them between computer, and HDMI in.  I added faster RAM to its max 16GB, and replaced the 2TB HDD with a 1TB WD Blue SSD. It is a 2014 design that sold for ~$2200.00 I picked it up at Woot.com for $999.99 refurbished by Dell with a new 1 year warranty that I extended twice as it did need repairs twice.

When we moved to CO four years later, I left the 2720 AIO in the box when I went back to LA to sell the old house for six months. I set it up when I got back in Nov 2019. It refused to boot no matter what I tried when I got back here as it did not see the hard drive. So I bought a new Dell AIO on sale for $850.00 to replace it. I took the 2720 apart in January 2020 to remove the RAM, 2TB hard drive, mSATA drive, and trayless DVD Multi. I noticed the CMOS watch battery was secured, but on a hunch, since I keep watch batteries of all sizes my devices need in foam insert battery case with my rechargeable AA/AAA/AAAA/9 volt and AA to C and D size adapters. Watch batteries on ebay and Amazon are cheaper for 20-50  batteries than two batteries retail at local stores. I pay usually five bucks for 20-50 watch batteries of all sizes I use here, only occasionally getting a dead one. It did not behave like dead batteries in the past, that booted but showed the wrong date each boot, so I never thought. It was the battery. I put a new one in on a hunch and reinstalled everything and it booted like nothing ever happened! I used the new Inspiron 7790 AIO as my main computer for a few weeks until the 3.5mm headphone jack stopped working under warranty, and they fixed it over the phone and remoting into it. Their fix lasted two weeks and they said I had to ship it to them at their expense, under warranty. I put the 2720 back on my desk and put the 7790 on my desk for working on systems in my office. I almost salvaged my main system and threw it out! Its i7 is still as fast as the new 10^th gen i5 in the new AIO I bought new from Dell. I much prefer it to the 10^th gen Dell Inspiron.

3.     Dell Inspiron 7790 AIO This guy when scanned by Crucial.com said it “Is one of the fastest we’ve seen!” It is an i5-10210U processor (10th Gen Kaby Lake-U/Y 14nm technology.) It came with one 8GB stick of DDR fast RAM. Dell sent it with one 8GB Stick leaving the other slot for upgrades. I bought a 16GB stick bringing it to 24GB DDR4 RAM. It has two RAM SODIMM slots and instead of two 4GB for 8GB RAM it was one 8GB so I could and did add more without throwing out any RAM Sticks.

One of the reasons it is so fast, in addition to the 40% or so faster 10^th Generation processors and mobo, is it is configured to have the system drive C to be on the 256GB BC511-NVMe SK Hynix SSD. I upgraded the 1TB HDD it came with, to a WD Blue 1TB SSD for the storage drive. Overkill I know. I upgraded the warranty to in home next day after telephone diagnostics from mail in repairs only. So it is now i5/24GB/256GB NVMe C; drive and a WD Blue 1TB storage drive.

4.      The 3^rd AIO is my wife’s 23” Lenovo touchscreen. I literally stumbled over it in its open box at Best buy. Hers is the slowest of the three and she will eventually stop resisting my efforts to set the Inspiron up for her. The Lenovo has a Pentium G3440T dual core (Gag!) 2.80 GHz no turbo boost. When I sell the old HP tower hers will go too and she gets the Inspiron my back up machine. Hers has a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD, 12 GB DDR3, 1080p resolution touchscreen that looks better than the Dell full HD, and looks as smooth as the quad HD screens.

5.     I have two Surface Pro systems left after selling my first a Surface Pro 3 and one Surface Go. All three have the Surface type covers, and these rubber bumpers that really protect them - https://www.ebay.com/itm/For-Microsoft-Surface-Pro-7-6-5-4-Shockproof-Protective-Cover-Hand-Strap-Case/303342469506  The newest is my Surface Pro7:10^th Gen  i7 -1065G7/16GB/Toshiba 256GB SSD, 256 micro SD card, It has a tempered glass screen protector both USB a port and a USB C Port and it charges best with the C port and my 100 watt GaN USB C and USB A charger – but came with its own charging brick. It screams. It sits by my TV seat in the LR.

6.     Surface Pro 4 Intel i76650U, 8GB/256GB Samsung SSD/128GB micros SD card. Tempered glass screen protector, Red bumper case as above, Typecover, same case as the Pro 7. It is red for this one and blue on the Pro 7.

7.     Surface Go, this is the smaller 10” little brother to the Surface Pro 12.5 inch. I ordered in December 2019 at the same time as I ordered the Pro 7. It has the same smaller version of the bumper case, It also has its own smaller type cover, It came with Windows S and the option to permanently switch it to Windows 10 home which I did as soon as I used it the first time. It has the Intel Pentium 4415 CPU/8GB RAM/128GB Toshiba SSD. It also has the Glass screen protector. I jumped too soon as the speed is fine for use it boots fast but is quite a bit slower than the i7s - DUH? I am getting the newer Surface Go2 with the Core M3 processor and 8 GB Ram/128GB SSD and it is perfect. But I am going to sell this one first for a change.

8.     The LR is our main home theater with 5.1 Dolby Atmos surround I built an HP G1 micro PC with 16 GB RAM and a 128GB Intel SSD. They are out now but I bought 2 from them one for my son in Germany, and they looked like open box new leftovers never installed from whatever company had them. https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProDesk-600-G1-DM-i5-4590T-2-00GHz-Windows-10-Pro-SELECT-YOUR-SPECS-BH/193710521058 It came with 8GB RAM but I had two 8GB Sticks left over that were compatible so It now has 16GB RAM. I had to put a USB WiFi adapter and a Bluetooth adapter USB dongle. I just ordered another WiFi USB dongle as I was sharing with the big HP tower, so I have one left for my system.

9.     The family room has a 5.1 surround sound system. And it has a Beelink T34 micro computer Running Windows 10 Pro with the Intel Celeron N3350 processor/8GB RAM/256GB SATA SSD Beelink T34

So that’s what I use them for. I also have the Surface Pro 3 Dock which surprisingly works perfectly on my Pro 4 and my Pro 7 with a little wiggle to fit the thinner Pro 7. Surface Pro 3 Dock

I have three Fire Tablets used only as Kindles. The old Fire HDX 8.9", My 2017 Fire HD 10", and my bedside reader in addition to the Surface Go is the new 8" HD plus Fire HD8 PLus I do not read outside so we sold my Paper-white. Sorry you asked?

 

 

Edited March 14, 2021 by RV_

[Al F]

On 3/13/2021 at 8:27 PM, RV_ said:

 

Yep, I did the Devry Institute Basic electronics course in 1972 and built the Heathkit GR 2000 25" TV that had electronic tuning before you could get electronic tuning TVs in the stores, and built my digital Multimeter, and O-Scope.

I built the pretty much the same Heathkit TV set along with the electronics coruse.  Mine had remote electronic tuning, if you can call it "electronic".  It had a remote and the TV would change the channels by stepping the tuning dial though the 12 or 13 channels you could select.  But, hey, we didn't have to get up to change the channel. 

[Dutch_12078]

1 hour ago, Al F said:

I built the pretty much the same Heathkit TV set along with the electronics coruse.  Mine had remote electronic tuning, if you can call it "electronic".  It had a remote and the TV would change the channels by stepping the tuning dial though the 12 or 13 channels you could select.  But, hey, we didn't have to get up to change the channel. 

I did the DeVry course and color TV around the same time courtesy of the VA. My wife discovered our garage door opener remote would also change the TV channels and didn't tell me. She'd sit in the kitchen and switch channels now and then, driving me nuts trying to figure out what was wrong with the TV.

[RV_]

That's pretty cool having all of us done those old correspondence courses. I Swore they never took out a bad module and just kept sending them out for us to diagnose and return! I swore I would never do another final convergence on any TV again. I'd be adjusting the last square an the whole thing would skew and I'd have to start over. I thought I'd never get it finished. LOL! And memorizing the resistor color codes was for naught as I forgot them since there was little component level repairs since then.

Amazing how far electronics have come since. QLEDs, WiFi, Bluetooth, our combined scifi dreams were exceeded no?

[Al F]

It took me forever to complete the course and build the TV.  Placing and soldering every small component was a pain.  I remember doing the convergence was a pain as well.  

WOW, that was 50 some odd years ago, where did the time go?

[RV_]

I know Al. Worse, my subjective time is speeding up so a day takes an hour now, relative to my 12 y/o self in class thinking an hour takes a day.

Edited March 19, 2021 by RV_

[Al F]

Yep, as a 12 year old, one year was 1/12th of my life.  Now one year is just a tiny part, less than 1/70th of my life.  

[RV_]

1/69th of mine in May. I'm stealing that analogy!