News

Microsoft Investigating LocalSystem Access Bug

Security personnel in Redmond are investigating a newly reported zero-day bug vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems and server systems.

Security personnel in Redmond are investigating a newly reported zero-day bug vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems and server systems. The bug, disclosed on Thursday by Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft, allows escalation of privilege to occur for authenticated users under specific conditions.

Users on a given system can elevate their access privileges to LocalSystem in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Sisk explained in an e-mail to Redmondmag.com. It could cause havoc by giving an authenticated user inappropriate write, delete and change privileges.

The fix for this potential problem is still in the works.

"Microsoft has issued Security Advisory (951306) to provide guidance to affected customers to help them protect themselves. Upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to help protect our customers. This may include providing a security update through our monthly release process," Sisk wrote.

The advisory is specifically addressed to IT pros overseeing an environment where several logged-in users provide their own code. Typically, programmers or administrators would have such rights. Specific cases include users working with Microsoft's Internet Information Services, which supports Web-based operational services, and SQL Server.

To address the issue, IT shops should keep at least a cursory, if not detailed, log of daily access to critical systems and applications. A segregation of duties program may be helpful too. Under such a regimen, programmers aren't deploying applications in a live production environment, and neither are the testers of those applications.

In the security advisory, Microsoft contends that companies providing space on their servers for use by off-site clients, or hosting providers, "may be at increased risk from this elevation of privilege vulnerability."

About the Author

Jabulani Leffall is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Investor's Business Daily, The Economist and CFO Magazine, among others.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Get Started Using .NET Aspire with SQL Server & Azure SQL Database

    Microsoft experts are making the rounds educating developers about the company's new, opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed, cloud-native applications with .NET.

  • Microsoft Revamps Fledgling AutoGen Framework for Agentic AI

    Only at v0.4, Microsoft's AutoGen framework for agentic AI -- the hottest new trend in AI development -- has already undergone a complete revamp, going to an asynchronous, event-driven architecture.

  • IDE Irony: Coding Errors Cause 'Critical' Vulnerability in Visual Studio

    In a larger-than-normal Patch Tuesday, Microsoft warned of a "critical" vulnerability in Visual Studio that should be fixed immediately if automatic patching isn't enabled, ironically caused by coding errors.

  • Building Blazor Applications

    A trio of Blazor experts will conduct a full-day workshop for devs to learn everything about the tech a a March developer conference in Las Vegas keynoted by Microsoft execs and featuring many Microsoft devs.

  • Gradient Boosting Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the gradient boosting regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to existing library implementations of gradient boosting regression, a from-scratch implementation allows much easier customization and integration with other .NET systems.

Subscribe on YouTube