Of all the bugs in January 2022’s Patch Tuesday analysis, I think this one has to be hands down the most complex one to exploit. There is very little information from the advisory on what this bug is however here is what I can piece together from the limited bits of information that are available.

Supposively this affects virtual machines, although its a little confusing cause if we look at the list of affected products we can see this goes all the way back to Windows 7, Hyper-V was released in 2008 with Windows Server 2008, which means that Windows 7 SP1 would also make sense since Windows 7 was released on October 22, 2019. This makes me believe that this is likely related to HyperV, but I cannot confirm this 100% at this time.

The second interesting thing is that the vulnerability is in IDE. Looking this up we can find https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/IDE where its noted that IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics and is a standard that defines the connection between a bus line on a motherboard and the computer’s disk storage devices.

Therefore if I had to take a stab at this I’d say this is some sort of vulnerability in HyperV that is related to how disk drives interface with the Virtual Machine, specifically in how HyperV virtualizes the IDE protocol when interacting with virtual disks.

Overall as this was found by Microsoft Research and Engineering and the attack complexity is listed as High, I doubt any public details will be coming out on this anytime soon, however if your organization uses Hyper-V and advanced technical attackers are within your risk profile, then I’d recommend patching this vulnerability ASAP. Otherwise, do try to patch this vulnerability when you can, but note that there are plenty of other vulns that are likely higher risk than this one in this months advisory.