According to CVE-2019-0708 article released today, a remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in Remote Desktop Services (RDP), previously known as Terminal Services. This vulnerability is pre-authentication and does not require user interaction. If the attacker manages to successfully exploit this vulnerability on the target system by sending specially crafted requests, this person will be able to install programs, make changes, delete data or create additional Administrator accounts.
Considering that no user interaction is required, this exploit could spread rapidly taking the entire company network down in no time. Microsoft released a patch for affected systems and is warning users of older versions of Windows to apply the patch as soon as possible!
With Microsoft patches being released, it’s only a matter of time before attackers start to reverse-engineer those patches and create malware for the widespread attack on vulnerable systems.
Even though Windows 10 and Windows 8 machines are not affected, there are still millions of machines running Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server editions that are very much vulnerable. For this reason, Microsoft had to release patches for unsupported Windows operating systems.
Although possible, we hope that we won’t see another global malware spreading across the globe like it was the case with WannaCry ransomware two years ago.