Prime Highlights
- Microsoft’s April 2025 Patch Tuesday patched 124 vulnerabilities across the company’s extensive array of products.
- Two were zero-day, actively exploited vulnerabilities that were high-level security issues.
Key Facts
- Zero-days resolved a SmartScreen Prompt bypass as well as proxy driver spoofing vulnerability.
- There were fixes to critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in Defender for IoT.
- 40 SQL Server issues and 24 Secure Boot vulnerabilities were resolved in the patch.
Key Background
Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday in April 2025 is one of the largest in recent times, patching 124 security issues across multiple product lines. The magnitude of this patch is underscored by the fact that it addresses two zero-day vulnerabilities that have already been exploited in the wild.
The first zero-day, CVE-2024-29988, is a SmartScreen bypass security flaw. Its weakness was used by attackers who took advantage of it to skip Microsoft safety warning prompts when users attempted to execute untrusted content, hence increasing the risk of executing malware. The second, CVE-2024-26234, is proxy driver spoofing attack. Discovered by Sophos X-Ops researchers, it allowed malicious drivers to impersonate genuine Microsoft-signed code—potentially enabling the execution of invisible attacks on systems.
A critical part of the patch also addressed remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Defender for IoT. The vulnerabilities—CVE-2024-21322, CVE-2024-21323, and CVE-2024-29054—were in the in-built web interface, and could be exploited by authenticated users with file upload privileges. Exploitation would enable attackers to perform path traversal to execute arbitrary code, thereby compromising sensitive IoT environments.
Another big chunk of the patch addresses 40 vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL Server, all with a high CVSS score of 8.8. As much as it would typically require an attacker to be able to get users to connect to the attacker’s SQL instance that had been compromised in some manner, the sheer number of these patches reflects the number of complexity of the issues involved.
Additionally, 24 were found and fixed in Windows Secure Boot, the central component protecting system startup integrity. Although Microsoft had considered attacking them as not highly likely, they are a threat in the long term, especially considering past Secure Boot exploits like the 2023 attack by the bootkit BlackLotus.
With this comprehensive refresh, Microsoft proves itself dedicated to proactive vulnerability management in the long term. Security teams should prioritize such patches, especially the zero-days and RCE vulnerabilities, to ensure strong system defenses.
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