#microsoft

A developing piece of ransomware called Big Head is being distributed as part of a malvertising campaign that takes the form of bogus Microsoft Windows updates and Word installers. Big Head was first documented by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs last month, when it discovered multiple variants of the ransomware that are designed to encrypt files on victims' machines in exchange for a cryptocurrency

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** The user would have to click on a specially crafted URL to be compromised by the attacker.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?** The attacker would gain the rights of the user that is running the affected application.

Microsoft has mitigated an attack by a China-based threat actor Microsoft tracks as Storm-0558 which targeted customer emails. Storm-0558 primarily targets government agencies in Western Europe and focuses on espionage, data theft, and credential access. Based on customer reported information on June 16, 2023, Microsoft began an investigation into anomalous mail activity.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, a successful exploitation could lead to a scope change (S:C). What does this mean for this vulnerability?** The vulnerability is in the web server, but the malicious scripts execute in the victim’s browser on their machine.

**According to the CVSS metric, privileges required is high (PR:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires the attacker or targeted user to have specific elevated privileges. Only users with roles “Cluster Admin” and “Cluster Operator” can access this.

**What type of information could be disclosed by this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could potentially read small portions of heap memory.

**How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?** An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by tricking an authenticated user into attempting to connect to a malicious SQL server via ODBC, which could result in the server receiving a malicious networking packet. This could allow the attacker to execute code remotely on the client.

**What type of information could be disclosed by this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could view heap memory from a privileged process running on the server.