Holes found in Windows update
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Security firms are starting to find loopholes and bugs in the SP2 security update for Windows XP.
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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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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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Security experts are reporting several new Windows and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities at year-end, including a flaw in the way Windows handles image files, and another involving IE and SP2 help files.
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Microsoft Corp. released four critical patches Tuesday to plug security holes in several versions of its Windows operating system, Internet Explorer Web browser and other programs.
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Microsoft issues fixes for more than 20 holes in its software in its February security update.
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Microsoft Corp.  released on Tuesday a patch for its latest "critical" rated security flaw affecting its Windows, Office and developer tools software programs.
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Ziff Davis - Microsoft has published a list of nearly 50 software programs that require tweaking in order to work with its most recent Windows update.
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft released a patch for its latest &quot;critical&quot; rated security flaw affecting its Windows, Office and developer tools software programs, the company said Tuesday.
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peeon writes &quot;Right before Christmas, four new Windows NT/2k/XP vulnerabilities were posted to the Bugtraq list. This story discusses two of the vulnerabilities in the LoadImage function (buffer overflow) and
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News of holes in security appliances come a few days after company patches operating system bugs.
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Games and security programs are on a long list of software that does not work well with the Windows SP2 update.
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Patches address flaws in Microsoft Agent in Windows 2000, Windows Services for UNIX, Visual Studio, MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.
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You've been warned Next week's Patch Tuesday will see Microsoft issue three updates that fix "critical" security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and the .Net framework. The critical designation is Microsoft's most severe rating and usually applies to flaws that can allow a computer to be hijacked with little or no interaction on the part of the user.â¦
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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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Cures for an update gone bad, a trashed Registry, and a shutdown failure.
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Six high priority updates, in all Microsoft is to issue four critical security fixes for this month's Patch Tuesday. Three of these affect either Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 7, which the software maker holds out as a paragon of its conversion to secure computing. In all, Microsoft will push six high-priority updates this Tuesday, the company announced today.â¦