Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 edition of the Sands and a

storm center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and today I'm recording from Jacksonville,

Florida. Well, today, of course, we have to start with our Patch Tuesday review. Microsoft released updates for 209 vulnerabilities. I think that's quite a bit higher than what we usually see.

Twelve of these vulnerabilities are classified as critical. Five have been disclosed prior to today.

And then we also have three vulnerabilities that were actively exploited,

making them seraday vulnerabilities. So let's start with some of these seraday vulnerabilities.

Now, all the already exploited vulnerabilities do affect Microsoft access, and there are actually

three distinct remote code execution vulnerabilities

that are being addressed with this update.

They're only rated as important,

which is a little bit odd for remote code execution vulnerabilities.

But there is a reason behind this in order to exploit the vulnerability.

The attacker actually has to convince the user to

open a file in Microsoft Access. So this is more like some of these office vulnerabilities

or such where the victim has to open a document, which is less likely also with access. And the patch actually just blocks some of these malicious or potentially malicious

document types that could be used for code execution.

And out of the five already disclosed vulnerabilities, three are assigned to Microsoft Access.

Haven't really run into Access in quite a while, but I'm sure it's still around.

And in this case, it could lead to remote code execution.

Microsoft only rates these vulnerabilities as important.

Haven't really seen access of being exposed a lot.

Way back in the day a couple times with web applications,

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