Microsoft Emergency Internet Explorer Patch Causes Boot Failure For Lenovo Laptops
Last week, Microsoft released an emergency patch to fix a zero-day security issue in Internet Explorer. If left unpatched, an attacker could exploit the security hole to remotely execute malicious code on a victim's PC when visiting a compromised website. Releasing a patch was all well and good, except that there's an known issue that is quite annoying for some Lenovo laptop owners.
"After installing KB4467691, Windows may fail to start up on certain Lenovo laptops that have less than 8GB of RAM," Microsoft lists as one of several known issues.
Microsoft is working with Lenovo to resolve the issue through a future update. In the meantime, the company has a couple of suggested workarounds for affected users.
"Restart the affected machine using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). Disable Secure Boot and then restart.
If BitLocker is enabled on your machine, you may have to go through BitLocker recovery after Secure Boot has been disabled," Microsoft says.
Microsoft released the out-of-band security patch to plug up the security hole found in versions of Internet Explorer 9 through 11. It affects all supported versions of Windows.
The vulnerability could allow an attacker to take full control of a system, if the victim is logged in with administrative rights. At that point, the attacker would be able to install malware on the target PC; view, edit, and delete data; and create new accounts with full user rights. In other words, it's a pretty serious vulnerability.
"The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying how the scripting engine handles objects in memory," Microsoft said.
It's recommended that everyone apply the patch, which Microsoft has been automatically pushing through Windows Update. However, potentially affected Lenovo laptop owners may want to consider holding off for the time being until Microsoft and Lenovo issue another update.
