Microsoft fixes critical flaw in security products
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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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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has released its monthly set of security patches, fixing a critical flaw in Office. Attackers could exploit the bug by tricking Office users into opening a maliciously encoded .pub document, which would then allow attackers to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC. These .pub documents are created by Microsoft's Publisher software, an Office component used for designing print and online business publications. The flaw isÂ described here. Microsoft rates the bug as critical for Publisher 2000, but this warning has been downgraded to "important" for the Publisher 2002 and Publisher 2003 products. Although Publisher is the application being patched, Office users should also be mindful of the issue because Publisher is part of the Office Professional Edition suite, said Christopher Budd, a program manager with Microsoft's Security Response Center. Some security experts expected Microsoft toÂ fix a similar bug in Word, which has been used by online attackers over the past few weeks, but that problem remains unfixed. Microsoft acknowledged the Word problem last week but was unable to run a fix through its quality assurance tests in time for September's updates, according to Budd. "It was just not feasible from an engineering standpoint ... to get the quality testing in," he said. Both the Word and Publisher bugs rely on the same type of attack to work: an attacker e-mails a malicious document and somehow tricks the victim into clicking on the attachment. Security experts have been seeing more of these Office flaws exploited of late. "This is one of the trends that we have observed," said Amol Sarwate, director of the Qualys Inc. vulnerability research lab. "The growing number of client-side vulnerabilities where you have a malformed Publisher file or Word file or Excel file." Tuesday's patches also include less-critical fixes for two Windows components: the PGM (Pragmatic General Multicast) protocol used by Microsoft's Reliable Multicast Program software to transfer data, and the Windows Indexing service, which is used by the operating system's search engine. Microsoft's security bulletins offer more information. September may seem like aÂ bit of a reprieveÂ for harried system administrators who were given 19 updates to test and deploy over the past two months. Microsoft was forced toÂ reissue one of its August patchesÂ after it caused Internet Explorer to crash when working with a Web-based enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. But before Microsoft patchers get too relaxed, they should brace for the possibility of another patch later this month, Qualys said. Because attackers are actively exploiting the Word problem, Sarwate believes that Microsoft may issue an "out-of-cycle" patch for the problem, ahead of its next scheduled security updates, which are due Oct. 10. That prospect seems unlikely, however. Microsoft's Budd characterized the Word attacks as "very limited in terms of scope," saying, "at this point in time, we've not made any determination to do anything out-of-cycle."
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has released its monthly set of security patches , fixing problems in Windows, Internet Explorer and in the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) software used for secure Web browsing. In total, Microsoft released six sets of patches, called updates, fixing 15 flaws in its products. Four of these updates are rated critical and administrators should patch them as soon as possible, security experts said Tuesday. Many of the flaws that Microsoft patched on Tuesday can be exploited via the Web. In particular the MS07-033 update, which fixes bugs in Internet Explorer and MS07-031 , which addresses a critical flaw in the SSL libraries used by Windows. The SSL flaw is particularly interesting because it affects users who are visiting supposedly trustworthy Web sites, and because it could also affect non-Microsoft browsers like Firefox and Opera, said Amol Sarwate, manager of Qualys, Inc.'s vulnerability research lab. "It will affect all the browsers that call the libraries that are in the Windows operating system," he said. Although Microsoft warned that this flaw could be used by attackers to run unauthorized software on the victim's computer, this would be hard to do. "Attempts to exploit this vulnerability would most likely result in the Internet Web browser or application exiting," Microsoft wrote in its MS07-031 bulletin. "The system would not be able to connect to Web sites or resources using SSL ... until a restart of the system." The two other critical updates are MS07-035 , which fixes a bug in the core Windows operating system's Win32 API (application programming interface), and MS07-034 , which fixes bugs in Outlook Express and Windows Mail. Because MS07-035 could be exploited via the Web, it should also be patched as soon as possible, Sarwate said. The other updates released Tuesday fix less-critical flaws in Windows Vista and Microsoft's Visio drawing software. The Vista update is noteworthy because it marks the first time that Microsoft has patched a flaw that was introduced in the Vista operating system, Sarwate said. Previous Vista patches have repaired "legacy" code that was written for earlier versions of Windows, and then reused in Vista. But the MS07-032 update applies to Vista only. This flaw, rated "moderate" by Microsoft, could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to information such as administrative passwords stored within Windows.
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Sample code that exploits a yet-to-be-fixed Windows flaw is circulating. Microsoft plans to deal with it on the next Patch Tuesday.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has released its monthly set of security patches , fixing problems in Windows, Internet Explorer and in the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) software used for secure Web browsing.
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Microsoft Corp.  issued  six "critical" security patches on Tuesday to fix flaws in its  software products that the company warned could allow attackers  to take control of a user's computer.
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Microsoft adds another product to the list of those vulnerable to a critical bug patched nearly three weeks ago.
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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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Microsoft released a &quot;critical&quot; fix on Thursday for a security issue left unresolved by the Windows XP Service Pack 2. The configuration change closed a hole in the Windows firewall settings that could open
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has fixed a critical flaw in the Windows operating system that could be used by criminals to create a self-copying computer worm attack.
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Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released several security fixes for its Windows operating system and Office software, and rereleased two previous patches.
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Microsoft's clutch of security updates this month will probably include a fix for a vulnerability in Excel that has been exploited by attackers for several weeks.
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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. 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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By JESSICA MINTZ SEATTLE - 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 today released a dozen security updates to fix a score of vulnerabilities in various products, including a "critical" patch for its own security software.
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Microsoft said Wednesday that another one of its operating system products is vulnerable to a critical vulnerability, first patched two weeks ago.