August Update Tuesday – OneNote’s First RCE, IE Memory Corruption

The second Tuesday of the month is here along with Microsoft’s August security updates, and with it brings interesting updates of OneNote and Internet Explorer. The full list is nine security bulletins long.

OneNote has been a part of Microsoft’s drive into mobile and cloud technologies, away from traditional Wintel computing, providing Office-integrated note-taking multi-user collaborative functionality across tablets and mobile devices. I noticed a bunch of Blackhat attendees using this software. While the vulnerability is limited to all versions of Microsoft OneNote 2007,, and there have been a couple of releases since, I believe that this vulnerability is the first RCE enabled by a component exclusively delivered with the OneNote software. In this case, it is the file parser that reads onenote (.ONE) files that enables remote code execution attacks. This software package now is available for Windows, Mac, Windows RT, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and Symbian, but the vulnerable OneNote code appears to be available only for TabletPCs and the Windows platform. cve-2014-2815 was privately reported to Microsoft.

Another big Bulletin pushed today for Internet Explorer addresses 25 critical RCE vulnerabilities(!) across IE 6 – 11 on Windows clients Vista through 8.1, all memory corruption issues. The browsers on related server installs are rated moderate. Some of these vulnerabilities have been actively exploited ItW, so it is an urgent update issue.

And Adobe released their own patch separately from the Microsoft update process to fix an extraordinary sandbox vulnerability abused by APT that we reported a while back. Be sure to check out those details. It effects fairly recent versions of Reader sandboxes.