Microsoft pushes out follow-up Exchange update – what admins need to know

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Microsoft rolled out additional updates for Exchange Server over the weekend. That's according to heise online, citing Microsoft. The patches close a privilege escalation vulnerability – a flaw that could allow attackers to expand their access rights on a system.

What makes privilege escalation so dangerous: it's rarely the first attack, but the decisive second link in the chain. Anyone who manages to gain only limited rights on an Exchange server in the first place – for example via a compromised account or another vulnerability – can use the privilege escalation to elevate to administrator, and thereby read all email traffic, redirect mailboxes, or distribute malicious code across the infrastructure.

The current heise online report is missing the usual technical details: neither a CVE number nor affected Exchange versions nor a CVSS severity score are mentioned. So far, the only certainty is that Microsoft pushed out the update over the weekend and that it addresses a privilege escalation.

What admins should do now

As long as Microsoft doesn't provide more specific information, there's one main thing administrators can do: keep an eye on the usual update channels and check whether the weekend update has already been installed on – or can be deployed to – their Exchange servers. With a privilege escalation vulnerability, the window of opportunity is usually small – anyone who waits until CVE details become public gives attackers an unnecessary head start.

As soon as Microsoft or heise online follow up with which Exchange versions are specifically affected and whether there are indications of active exploitation of the flaw, that information should feed directly into patch prioritization.