A Brief History of Windows Vulnerabilities

• Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system worldwide with a market share >=70% as of 2021.
• The popularity and deployment of Windows by individuals and companies makes it a prime target for attackers given the threat surface.
• Over the last 15 years, Windows has had its fair share of severe vulnerabilities, ranging from MS08-067(Conflicker) to MS17-010 (EternalBlue).
• Given the popularity of Windows, most of these vulnerabilities have publicly accessible exploit code making them relatively straightforward to exploit.

Windows Vulnerabilities

• Microsoft Windows has various OS versions and releases which makes the threat surface fragmented in terms of vulnerabilities. For example, vulnerabilities that exist in Windows 7 are not present in Windows 10.

1. Regardless of the various versions and releases, all Windows OS’s share a likeness given the development model and philosophy:
2. Windows OS’s have been developed in the C programming language, making them vulnerable to buffer overflows, arbitrary code execution etc…
3. By default, Windows is not configured to run securely and require a proactive implementation of security practices in order to configure Windows to run securely.

• Newly discovered vulnerabilities are not immediately patched by Microsoft and given the fragmented nature of Windows, many systems are left unpatched.
• The frequent releases of new versions of Windows is also a contributing factor to exploitation, as many companies take a substantial length of time to upgrade their systems to the latest version of Windows and opt to use older versions that may be affected by an increasing number of vulnerabilities.
• In addition to inherent vulnerabilities, Windows is also vulnerable to cross platform vulnerabilities, for example SQL injection attacks.
• Systems/hosts running Windows are also vulnerable to physical attacks like; theft, malicious peripheral devices etc…

Types of Windows Vulnerabilities

1. Information disclosure - Vulnerability that allows an attacker to access confidential data.
2. Buffer overflows - Caused by a programming error, allows attackers to write data to a buffer and overrun the allocated buffer, consequently writing data to allocated memory addresses.
3. Remote code execution - Vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely execute code on the target system.
4. Privilege escalation - Vulnerability that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges after initial compromise.
5. Denial of Service (DOS) - Vulnerability that allows an attacker to consume a system/host’s resources (CPU, RAM, Network etc) consequently preventing the system from functioning normally.