Microsoft releases emergency security fix for PrintNightmare flaw — what to do
Microsoft today (July 6) pushed out an emergency patch to fix the very serious print-spooler flaw that was disclosed last week by accident.
The flaw, commonly known as “PrintNightmare” but catalogued as CVE-2021-34527, lets hackers remote seize control of any Windows system. Servers and enterprise Windows deployments are especially vulnerable to attacks using this flaw, but any computer running Windows 7 through the latest version of Windows 10 can be hit.
What you need to do
To install today’s update, run Windows Update on your Windows 10, 8.1 or 7 machine. Windows 10 users will see an update notice referring to knowledge base (KB) article KB5004940, KB5004945, KB5004946, KB5004947, depending on their build. For Windows 8.1, the knowledge base references are KB5004954 and KB5004958; Windows 7 gets KB5004951 or KB5004953. There’s more information in this Microsoft security bulletin.
After the update has been downloaded, you’ll be prompted to restart your machine to install the patch.
Don’t want the patch? Here’s what to do
If you’re truly leet and you think you don’t need to install the patch, find out by firing up PowerShell and typing in “Get-Service -Name Spooler” to see if the print spooler is running at all. (If you regularly print documents, it probably is. If you don’t know what PowerShell is, don’t do this.)
You can disable Print Spooler by typing the following into PowerShell, in order:
