April 18, 2026 - Red Dot Security

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Hello all,

Since the month started on Wednesday, it has seemed like a long time since there was a major release of patches and updates. Never fear, your wait is over! Adobe, Apache, Cisco, Microsoft, PHP, SAP, Splunk and more released updates to fix holes, defects, and vulnerabilities this past week. Some are highlighted in our Headline News, and others are linked elsewhere in this week’s newsletter. Anthropic Mythos and Claude 4.7 are continuing to make news, as is Adobe with their Creative Cloud’s move into the world of AI. Regarding AI, there are some interesting developments in the news that singularly are interesting, but when taken together are starting to make my “Spidey senses tingle”. More on that in my Musings section.

Headline NEWS:

Adobe Acrobat patched a zero-day last week. This week Adobe coughed up fixes for Illustrator, Reader, Acrobat, Photoshop, Bridge, ColdFusion, Connect, FrameMaker, Experience Manager, InCopy, and InDesign. Basically, if you have anything Adobe, check for updates if you are not already applying them automatically.
Cisco released patches for multiple Webex components, Identity Services Engine, Unity Connection, and ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent. Some of these are rated critical and can allow for remote code execution and user impersonation. There is no known active exploitation of these, yet.
Fortinet can’t stay out of the news and has a pair of critical FortiDefects in their FortiSandbox. Both can enable an “unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands”, according to FortiGuard Labs. They are currently not known to be exploited, so patch quickly.
Microsoft nearly broke a record this month with the second largest patch release in a single month with 167 defects, two of which are actively being exploited already. The most serious of these is the SharePoint Server flaw which allows an unauthenticated threat actor to view and tamper with information on the server. Microsoft advises the updates be applied as soon as possible. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse, in a bit of spite due to a disagreement with Microsoft, published a zero-day vulnerability that weaponizes Microsoft Defender against itself. Microsoft patched for that vulnerability with this month’s update. Chaotic Eclipse then promptly released two more defects in how Windows Defender functions, ensuring it was after the Microsoft released patches. Thank you for making everyone’s life more difficult with your temper tantrum Chaotic Eclipse. Your actions are marginally better than that of a threat actor.
Splunk Enterprise and Cloud Platform has a defect in how Splunk processes temporary files that enables a remote code execution attack. To be successful, the attacker only needs to have low privilege account access. There is a mitigation available if you can’t update immediately, however admins are advised to update to the latest version as soon as possible to fix this flaw.

In Ransomware, Malware, and Vulnerabilities News:

Microsoft vulnerabilities continued. In addition to the major Patch Tuesday defects that everyone talks about, there are some additional vulnerabilities for which Microsoft has released updates. They are a BitLocker bypass, an Active Directory vulnerability involving Remote Procedure Call (RPC) that enables compromise if the threat actor already has any level of access to the target network, and believe it or not, the Windows Snipping Tool can be used to steal a user’s credentials. Naturally, it involves Server Message Block (SMB) and malicious links that reach out to threat actor-controlled infrastructure. We’ve seen this type of attack using Outlook, all of the MS Office product suite, File Explorer, and now the Snipping Tool. All of the aforementioned vulnerabilities received patches in the April Patch Tuesdy release from Microsoft.

In Other News Events of Note and Interest:

Microsoft Remote Desktop has changed the way that .RDP files function after you apply the April Patch Tuesday updates. If you attempt to launch a Remote Desktop session by opening a file with a .RDP extension, you will receive a dialog box that requires you to approve the connection, and to select which local device resources to bring to the RDP session. I expect that this will catch quite a few Remote Desktop users by surprise, they won’t enable access to their devices, and then they’ll call tech support to help. But hey, that’s why we exist, right?

Musings

Artificial Intelligence continues to surprise those of us watching from the sidelines with how quickly it is advancing in capability. The one-upmanship game is extreme among the major vendors such as Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and X AI. Every week we read about a new major development or breakthrough in how the AI “thinks” and behaves. Thankfully, at least some of them appear to be putting up guardrails and walled gardens around their most potent creations.

I read a lot of tech headlines and articles and several that caught my attention in the past two weeks dealt with AI, robotics, and autonomous flight. As mentioned, AI is advancing at unbelievable speed. Last week I noted that China’s Alibaba marketplace is expected to start selling incredibly dexterous robots for a mere $4,300 soon. China just conducted a half-marathon where hundreds of robots were entered into the competition. Some were laughably bad. But others were shocking in their speed and fluidity, with the winner breaking the human world record time. This week I read about both the US Army and US Air Force successfully flying autonomous helicopters and fighter jets. I saw another article this week that spoke of deploying drone swarms from the back of the same model helicopter from the autonomous test. Drone swarms are already computer controlled. We are very close to a technology convergence where AI will be able to drive our cars, direct our robots, fly our planes and helicopters, and wage warfare. Didn’t I see this movie?

All is not lost. one of this week’s linked articles talks about the beginning of scarcity in AI – and it makes a lot of sense. Presently, there is only so much compute power and space to be had. As new AI models are introduced, they demand increased capacity and power at a rate that cannot be kept up with necessitating rationing and significantly increased costs, which will slow adoption. So perhaps the prior observations will take a bit longer to come to fruition, we can only hope.

Headline NEWS

Ransomware, Malware, and Vulnerabilities News

Other News Events of Note and Interest

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