Microsoft Releases Several Security Fixes
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Microsoft Corp. released eight security fixes Tuesday that carry its highest threat rating and urged computer users to install them quickly because all the vulnerabilities they address could let attackers take complete control of systems.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has rolled out its monthly security updates for December, patching critical flaws in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Format, and the Visual Studio 2005 development software. The seven security patches address 11 bugs, including two in the Windows Media Player software. However, no fixes were provided for two Microsoft Word flaws that have been used in a small number of attacks during the past week. Microsoft had said it would release only six patches on Tuesday, but the company added the Windows Media Format update at the last minute, after reports of attacks based on this vulnerability began surfacing. The Windows Media Format is used by Microsoft's Windows Media Player software. In late November, security vendors warned that a buffer overflow error could occur when the Windows Media Player processed ".asx" (Advanced Stream Redirector) media files, meaning that users would first need to be tricked into opening a malicious media file for the attack to work. In its update Tuesday, Microsoft also patched a similar bug in the way the media player processes ".asf" (Advanced Systems Format) files. The Internet Explorer patch fixes four bugs. It is also rated critical, and is noteworthy because some of these bugs will probably begin to be exploited by hackers by week's end, said Gunter Ollmann, director of IBM Corp.'s Internet Security System's X-Force threat analysis service. Enterprise administrators should also pay close attention to an SNMP (Simple Network Monitoring Protocol) patch issued Tuesday, Ollmann said. Microsoft has rated this patch as "important," rather than critical because SNMP is normally blocked at the firewall and turned off by default on Windows systems. However, it is widely deployed as part of the network monitoring infrastructure in the enterprise, and is often used on critical servers, Ollmann said. Ollmann believes this SNMP patch is the "most important" update for enterprise customers. "Since the service is widely deployed in the enterprise and since it's commonly deployed on servers, we think this would be an important attack vector for enterprises," he said. The remaining updates include a "critical" fix for Visual Studio 2005, and "important" updates for Windows and Outlook Express, Microsoft said. Microsoft defines "critical" flaws as bugs that could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without any action on the part of the victim. The company's next set of security updates are due Jan. 9.
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Well, it&#39;s &quot;Patch Day Tuesday&quot; again, and Microsoft just released another raft of security bulletins. We got ten bulletins this time, but that amounts to something upwind of 20 separate vulnerabilities
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Microsoft Corp. today released an unprecedented number of software security updates to plug flaws in its products, including seven "critical" defects that it said hackers could use to hijack vulnerable computers. -washingtonpost.com
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Monthly security updates include IE, Windows Media, and Visual Studio fixes.
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Four security bulletins issued today patch just four vulnerabilities in Windows, Visual Studio, and the MSN and Windows Live Messenger software.
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An update to Firefox fixes a number of security flaws in the browser.
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Microsoft Corp. yesterday released an unusually large number of software security updates to fix flaws in its products, some of which could be exploited to remotely take over computers running the Windows operating system.
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As part of its Patch Tuesday updates this week, Microsoft corrected 10 vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, 7 of which were deemed "critical." Three critical flaws were fixed in Excel that could allow for remote code execution, while one was fixed in Windows 2000 and Server 2003.
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Microsoft Corp. today released just two security updates that patch three vulnerabilities in Windows, with just one of the three flaws rated critical.
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Microsoft yesterday released 10 new security bulletins to fix multiple components in its Windows operating system and applications.
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Microsoft will release six security updates for Windows and Visual Studio next week.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ released its February set of security updates Tuesday, including critical fixes for bugs in Office and the scanning engine used by the company's security products. The security software flaw is of particular concern because it could, in theory, be very easily exploited by an attacker to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC. The bug has to do with the way that Microsoft's Malware Protection Engine, used by Windows Live One Care and Windows Defender, processes PDF files. Windows Defender is available for free and ships with Microsoft's Vista operating system. "An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted PDF that could potentially allow remote code execution when the target computer system receives, and the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans, the PDF file," Microsoft said in its bulletin on the patch. This engine is also used by Microsoft's Antigen and Windows Forefront Security products, meaning that Exchange servers running these products could also be compromised. Although there is not yet any known attack that exploits this flaw, it could become a serious problem for Windows users running Microsoft's security products, according to Amol Sarwate, vulnerability lab manager at Qualys. "These attacks are very difficult to avoid," he said. "These products run automatically in the background." Symantec rated this scanning engine flaw the most critical of the vulnerabilities patched on Tuesday. In total, six of Microsoft's 12 updates are rated as "critical," while the other six have the less-serious rating of "important." Among the patches is a widely anticipated update for Microsoft WordÂ that fixes six bugs in Microsoft's word processing software. Hackers had been exploiting a number of these bugs in very targeted attacks over the past few months. Other critical patches fix bugs in the ActiveX HTML Help control and Microsoft Data Access Components, both used by Windows, as well as flaws in Office and Internet Explorer.
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Microsoft released six updates to address various issues across its products on Tuesday, including four which were rated critical, and three that affected Windows Vista.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O released on Tuesday a patch for its latest &quot;critical&quot; rated security flaw affecting its Windows, Office and developer tools software programs.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft on Tuesday issued six security updates for Windows, Office, and .Net Framework, patching a total of 11 vulnerabilities -- five of them rated critical. The most serious of the batch is MS07-039, said security analysts who, unlike lastÂ  month, had no trouble naming that critical update as the one which should beÂ  patched first. "By far, this is the top of the list this month," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. MS07-039 patches a pair of bugs in Active Directory in Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, the two supported server editions of Microsoft's operating system. The most dangerous of the two is a vulnerability in the way Active Directory validates an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) request.Â  According to Microsoft's write-up, "an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system." "Definitely at the top of today's list," agreed David Dewey, a researcher with IBM Internet Security Systems' X-Force team. "It's definitely exploitable." Dewey should know, since it was a colleague at ISS, Neel Mehta, who discovered the flaw last summer. "Neel's created proof-of-concept code in-house during the time we worked on this with Microsoft," said Dewey. "It would certainly be worth the effort" to exploit this, added Storms. "Active Directory is in the center of every Windows network. There's a lot in there, including the group policy objects that set security -- and everything about every user." Unlike most vulnerabilities, the Active Directory bug can be exploited without any user interaction, and on Windows 2000 Server, the older of the two operating systems, it can be attacked by an anonymous user. Although Windows Server 2003 may look safer at first glance -- an attacker must have valid credentials to exploit the bug on that edition -- looks can be deceiving, said Tom Cross, another X-Force researcher. "In this case, the authentication requirements become less important," said Cross. "Anyone on the network -- an employee, for example -- would by definition have credentials." Worse, said Cross, is that outside attackers could exploit this without a lot of trouble by bundling an MS07-039 exploit with a multi-strike attack that figures on compromising some fraction of enterprise laptops while they're outside the network. Once back inside the enterprise's perimeter, the Active Directory exploit could fire up -- using the credentials of the hijacked notebook -- to grab systems running the supposedly more secure Windows Server 2003. Two of the remaining five bulletins were pegged "critical" by Microsoft, while another two were marked "important." The final update was tagged as "moderate." MS07-036, which patches three vulnerabilities, two of them judged critical and oneÂ  of them a zero-day flaw already out in public, repairs bugs in Excel 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007. Similar vulnerabilities in other Microsoft Office document formats, including those in Word and PowerPoint, have been used by attackers to slip malicious code into corporations. Some of these attacks have been so narrowly targeted that they're launched against just one user at one company. What's interesting about this update, said a Symantec researcher in an e-mail, is that Microsoft got it wrong back in February when it downplayed the initial report of the Excel threat. Then, Symantec's DeepSight threat network analysts reported Excel 2003 was susceptible to a denial-of-service bug which, if exploited, could crash the program. Four months ago, Microsoft denied that the bugs were actually vulnerabilities. "Microsoft has completed its investigation of new public reports of possibleÂ  vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Excel 2003 [and] hasÂ  confirmed that these are not product vulnerabilities," a spokeswoman toldÂ  Computerworld at the time. "They are issues that can cause the application to become unresponsive. Users can restart the application," she said. "[Today's] bulletin includes a fix for a previously disclosed denial-of-service issue from February 2007 which is now billed as having the potential for remote code execution," noted Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec's security response group. As Friedrichs pointed out, Microsoft characterized all three bugs patched by MS07-036 as having a "remote code execution" impact, meaning that hackers couldÂ  inject their own malware into a PC after exploiting the Excel flaws. The third critical update, MS07-040, plugs three holes in the .Net Framework, the primary Windows runtime environment called on by developers. Notably, all three vulnerabilities were previewed during a sneak peek at the Syscan'07 security conference last week in Singapore. But the patches may be a ton of trouble to corporate IT managers, said Storms, because the .Net Framework is so widely used by corporate developers of in-house software. "Not only will [companies] have to run QA on the patches, they'll have to run QA on the code that runs on .Net," said Storms. The fixes in MS07-040 apply to all but Version 3.x of .Net Framework, adding additional complexity to in-enterprise application testing. Of the remaining security updates, one fixes a flaw in Publisher 2007, another patches Internet Information Services 5.1 on Windows XP Professional SP2, and the thirdÂ  quashes a bug in Windows Vista's bundled firewall. That last, although rated "moderate," second-from-the-bottom in Microsoft's four-step severity rating system, is worth some reflection, said Symantec's Friedrichs. "Microsoft's decision to rewrite the Windows network stack and its accompanying firewall [for Vista] continues to have long-term security implications," Friedrichs said. "A network stack can take decades of heavy scrutiny in order to become battle hardened. As an operating system's first line of defense, its quality is directly related to its ability to withstand attack." On its own, added Friedrichs, the firewall bug isn't a big deal; the result of an exploit is that the attacker can "see" the system when it should actually be completely invisible to outside probes. "[But] if this logic flaw were combined with a vulnerability in one of the exposed services, this could have more serious, widespread implications." As usual, Microsoft's monthly updates have been posted to Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, and they can also be retrieved through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
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Microsoft Corp. will release six groups of security patches next week including three critical updates for Windows and Excel users.