Microsoft is sounding a red alert to Windows 10 users, warning them to update their operating systems immediately.
The company, in a blog post Tuesday, warned of two “critical” vulnerabilities that rival the previous “BlueKeep” crisis. As with that bug, the new issues are described as “wormable,” meaning hackers could use them to spread malware from one machine to another without any interaction from the user.
Microsoft said, so far, it has no evidence that the vulnerabilities were known to any third parties.
“It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these,” said Simon Pope, Microsoft’s director of Incident Response. “Customers who have automatic updates enabled are automatically protected by these fixes.”
If you don’t have automatic updates enabled, you can search for the patch by typing “Windows Update” in the search bar from the system’s start menu search bar.
The vulnerabilities are only present in Windows 10, which runs on more than 800 million devices today. Older systems, such as Windows XP, are not affected.
The comparisons to BlueKeep underscore how serious Microsoft is taking these security flaws. That flaw was deemed so serious that the National Security Agency got involved to warn people to update their systems.
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