Microsoft releases seven &#39;critical&#39; security patches
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Microsoft has issued ten new software security patches, seven of which are deemed so &#39;critical&#39; that it is advising firms to download them immediately.
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Microsoft Corp. warned on Tuesday of  seven newly found flaws in its software that could allow an  attacker to steal data and take over a personal computer  running the Windows operating system.
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Microsoft Corp. plans to release 13 sets of security patches next Tuesday fixing critical vulnerabilities in a number of its products, including the company's new security software.
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Microsoft plans to release a dozen security updates next week to patch critical vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Visual Studio and in its anti-virus software.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft plans to release 13 sets of security patches next Tuesday fixing critical vulnerabilities in a number of its products, including the company's new security software. The bulk of the patches will fix flaws in the Windows operating system and Office, Microsoft said in a statement published Thursday on its Web site. Five of the updates will be for Windows, and two of them will be for Office. Microsoft also plans to release one less-critical update that addresses flaws in both Windows and Office. The patches will be released as part of Microsoft's monthly cycle of security updates. There will also be patches for Microsoft's Step-by-Step Interactive Training andÂ Microsoft Data Access Components and an update that covers both Windows and Visual Studio. Finally, Microsoft will also publish an update that patches critical flaws in its Windows Live OneCare, Antigen, Windows Defender, and ForeFront security software. The Office patches have been anticipated as online criminals have been exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in Word and Excel for several months now. These attacks, which are occurring on a limited scale according to Microsoft, try to trick the victim into opening a maliciously coded Office attachment in order to compromise the PC.
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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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Does this mean 40 lean days ahead? Microsoft pushed patches for 12 vulnerabilities out of the door yesterday, six of them classed as critical and six of them important.â¦
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Microsoft Corp. released two security fixes Tuesday that carry its most severe threat rating, including one that applies even to computers that have downloaded the company's massive security update for the Windows XP operating system.
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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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In sharp contrast to last month&#39;s barrage of critical patches, Microsoft today offered up just one &quot;important&quot; fix for users to implement in its scheduled round of security updates for November.
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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¦
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Slew of Patch Tuesday security updates will include "critical" fixes for Windows, Office and Microsoft's security tools.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft will release six sets of security patches next Tuesday, four of which will fix critical flaws in the Windows operating system.
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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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"Patch Tuesday," when Microsoft Corp. releases repairs for problems in its software, came and went this week with six critical fixes &#151; including the first one that touches Vista, the new operating system billed as the most secure Windows version yet.
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Microsoft has released its last regular security update of the year which includes five new patches, all rated &#39;important&#39;, and the reissue of a &#39;critical&#39; patch after extensive revisions.
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SEATTLE - Microsoft has warned of seven newly found flaws in its software that could allow an attacker to steal data and take over a personal computer running the Windows operating system.