Microsoft has fixed a new Windows RPC CVE-2022-26809 vulnerability that is raising concerns among security researchers due to its potential for widespread, significant cyberattacks once an exploit is developed.
If exploited, any commands will be executed at the same privilege level as the RPC server, which in many cases has elevated or SYSTEM level permissions, providing full administrative access to the exploited device.
RPC allows processes on different devices to communicate with each other, with the RPC hosts listening for remote connections over TCP ports, most commonly ports 445 and 135.
Sentinel One researcher Antonio Cocomazzi has also played with the bug and successfully exploited it on a custom RPC server, not a built-in Windows service.
While researchers are still working on figuring out the full technical details of the bug and how to reliably exploit it, security researcher Matthew Hickey, co-founder of Hacker House, has also been playing analyzing the vulnerability.
“It’s as bad as it can get for Windows enterprise systems, it is important to stress that people should apply the patch because it can surface in a number of configurations of both client and server RPC services,” Hickey told BleepingComputer in a conversation about the bug.
