Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for December 2018

Another month and another Patch Tuesday update from Microsoft. But this month, the buzz is all about a third-party patch from Adobe that addresses a zero-day vulnerability. This vulnerability (CVE-2018-15982) is rated critical since it's being actively exploited in the wild. It's said that this vulnerability allows a maliciously crafted Flash object to execute code on a victim’s computer to gain command line access to their system.
In addition to the above vulnerability, Microsoft has patched 39 vulnerabilities, with 10 of them labeled critical. It has also patched a publicly exploited Windows kernel issue.
Patch Tuesday updates for Microsoft products
This month’s Patch Tuesday covers updates for the following list of products and software:
Adobe Flash Player
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps
Chakra Core
.NET Framework
Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Visual Studio
Windows Azure Pack (WAP)
Publicly exploited vulnerabilities
An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Windows kernel fails to handle objects in memory properly. This Patch Tuesday update patches this Windows kernel elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE:2018-8611).
Adobe Flash player updates
Adobe released one critical vulnerability fix for December, APSB18-42. As mentioned earlier, this patch is important because it addresses a vulnerability that is actively being exploited in the wild.
Non-security updates
This Patch Tuesday, Microsoft also released non-security updates for Office 2010, Office 2013, and Office 2016. View the entire list of non-security updates for the month of December.
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