Microsoft Issues Five Bulletins on Windows Flaws
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Desktops, servers affected, but no vulnerabilities deemed critical.
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Microsoft&#39;s monthly patch day for December will produce security updates for five vulnerabilities affecting Windows users, the company said Thursday.
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The software giant addresses three vulnerabilities within the Windows operating system.
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Microsoft Corp. released 10 security fixes for various products yesterday, including seven that fix flaws the company said pose the highest threat to users.
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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.
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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. 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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Microsoft on Tuesday issued 10 security advisories â-even of them critical â -ing consumers and businesses to patch 21 new flaws in Windows software products.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will release five sets of security patches next Tuesday, including a critical update for users of Windows 2000,Â the company saidÂ Thursday. With the remaining four security updates rated as "important" by Microsoft, this latest round of patches appears to be less worrisome than the August updates. Last month,Â Microsoft released nine updates, six of which were rated critical. Microsoft rates its bug fixes as critical when attackers can exploit the flaws without requiring any user action. Also set to be patched this month are Visual Studio, Windows Services for Unix, SharePoint Services, and the Windows Live and MSN Messenger software. Microsoft releases its security patches on the second Tuesday of each month, generally around 11 a.m., Pacific time. With this latest rounds of patches, Microsoft will have released 55 updates in 2007, the same number it had released by September of last year.
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Microsoft plans to issue twelve patches next Tuesday, five of which deal with issues in its Office productivity suite.
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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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As expected, Microsoft has pushed out patches for four vulnerabilities in Windows, Visual Studio and the MSN and Windows Live Messenger software.
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Microsoft Corp. today released an unprecedented number of software security updates to plug flaws in its products, including seven &quot;critical&quot; defects that it said hackers could use to hijack
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Microsoft issued 11 security bulletins on Patch Tuesday covering a total of 17 vulnerabilities, 10 of them critical. The 11 patches address the Windows operating system, the Internet Explorer Web browser, Microsoft Office and other programs.
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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. on Tuesday plans to release five security updates targeting flaws in Windows, SharePoint, Visual Studio and Microsoft's instant messaging clients.
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After kicking off 2008 with just two security updates in January, Microsoft plans to release one of its largest bundles of patches ever next Tuesday.Twelve security updates are set to be released next week, the software vendor said Thursday in a note on its Web site. Seven of these have been given Microsoft&#39;s most serious rating of &quot;critical.&quot; The remaining five are rated &quot;important.&quot;The critical updates are for Microsoft&#39;s Windows operating system, Internet Explorer and the company&#39;s Office software, all of which are frequent targets of hackers. Here&#39;s how they break down: Two of the critical updates are for Windows, and there is one update each for Internet Explorer, Office, Office Publisher, and Microsoft Word. A critical update is also being readied for the VBScript and JScript scripting languages used by Internet Explorer.By exploiting vulnerabilities in these applications, attackers could, in theory, run unauthorized software on a victim&#39;s PC, Microsoft warns.The less-severe updates will be for Windows Vista, Active Directory, and Microsoft Works. Two important updates are also planned for the Internet Information Services Web server software.Microsoft releases its security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, a date known as &quot;Patch Tuesday&quot; in IT circles. Last year it released a total of 69 updates, an average of just under six per month, so next week&#39;s 12 releases are sure to keep IT administrators busy.