It’s a pretty bumper crop of patches though with 13 bulletins and 19 vulnerabilities fixed, the highest profile one being a patch for the zero-day vulnerability exploited by Duqu.

The pulling of the BEAST patch is good in a way though I guess, it shows that Microsoft are doing comprehensive compatibility testing to ensure the patches don’t cause any problems (including with 3rd party software).

Microsoft released 13 security bulletins addressing 19 vulnerabilities overnight, as part of a bumper final Patch Tuesday of the year.

Highlight of the baker’s dozen is a patch for the the zero-day vulnerability exploited by Duqu (sibling of Stuxnet) worm back in October. Fixing the underlying flaw exploited by Duqu involves the resolution of a problem in how Windows kernel mode driver handles TrueType font files.

Aside from this critical update the batch includes an update to address a critical flaw n Windows Media Player. A cumulative security update of ActiveX kill bits is covered by the third, and final, critical update this month. The other ten bulletins address less severe (important) flaws in Windows, IE and Office. Altogether its a desktop-heavy patch batch, as you can see from Microsoft’s summary here.

Microsoft originally promised 14 bulletins for the December edition of Patch Tuesday but one has been pulled, probably for quality control reasons. The original anticipated 14th bulletin was for the BEAST attack, but did not make it in time for the holidays due to a last minute software incompatibility uncovered during third party testing, security services firm Qualys reports. The absence of this fix means that Microsoft has issued a grand total of 99 bulletins this year, one less than the ton up that might have resulted in adverse headlines.

Both BEAST and Duqu are pretty nasty malware, I’d guess seen as though they’ve already fixed the BEAST problem – they just need to work on compatibility issues – that we’ll definitely be seeing the patch rolled out in the January Patch Tuesday.

It’s good to see a bunch of important patches rolled out pre Christmas though as there’s always an influx of malware, scams, spams and phishing attempts around this period (trying to leverage on people’s good will I guess).

The BEAST attack affects web servers that support SSLv3/TLSv1 encryption. Although a patch will have to wait until January, at least, Microsoft has already published a workaround, which involves using the non affected RC4 cipher in SSL setups.

The Internet Storm Centre has produced a helpful graphical overview of the Black Tuesday updates from Microsoft here. It reckons that some of the flaws are more severe than Redmond’s rating. By the ISC’s count there are EIGHT critical updates. Either way you look at it, this is a lot of patching work even before we think about other security updates doing the rounds.

Google and Adobe are also joining in on the season of giving by releasing updates of their own. Adobe last week issued a critical updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The latest version of Adobe PDF-reading software, Adobe Reader X, is not affected by this vulnerability thanks to the use of sand-boxing technology. So users have the option to either upgrade or apply a patch to the earlier version of the software.

In addition, Google published an update to its Chrome browser that addresses 15 security flaws, including six high-risk vulnerabilities, on Tuesday. More details of what’s fixed inside Chrome 16.0.912.63, the latest cross-platform version of the browser (yes Mac and Linux fans you ought to update too), can be found here.

There has been some other nasty bugs around too with a zero-day for Adobe Reader last week and Google just released a massive update of Chrome including 6 high risk vulnerabilities.

SANS ISC as always gives a great summary of the patches and classifies some of them more seriously than Microsoft does – you can check out the details here:

December 2011 Microsoft Black Tuesday Summary

Source: The Register

That’s a good thing because it’s had some horribly effective vulnerabilities revealed lately. It managed to package up a massive bundle of patches for 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and a few other software packages.

So if you’re running any Windows installations anywhere, make sure you get your Windows Update on ASAP and get those patches downloaded.

Microsoft has patched a record 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and five other software packages, many of which allowed attackers to remotely install malware on end user machines.

The most important fixes addressed a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser that was exploited in last month’s Pwn2Own contest. Although details were kept confidential, hackers have begun exploiting the critical flaw in real-world attacks, Microsoft warned. The use-after-free vulnerability affects versions 8 and earlier of the Microsoft browser.

The other top priority should be updates that patch critical vulnerabilities in the way Windows handles networking requests using the SMB, or Server Message Block, protocol. By sending malformed packets, attackers can remotely install malware on vulnerable machines with no user interaction required.

Researchers have warned that the flaw could be exploited to install self-replicating worms in much the way a similar vulnerability from 2008 did. Even after Microsoft issued an emergency patch for the flaw, it still opened the door to the Conficker Worm, which commandeered millions of machines.

If you remember back in March we reported on Day One At Pwn2Own Takes Out Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, they’ve fixed that flaw – which has been exploited in the wild.

I think Pwn2Own does play an important role in the security industry and really helps get some nasty bugs patched up. Of course I don’t think any of us are using Internet Explorer anyway…but still – a lot of people are.

Even on this site 18.3% of visitors are still using some version of IE (with the majority using 8, then 7 then 9 with 6 thankfully in 4th place).

The monster patch batch also included relief for another flaw in all supported versions of Windows that Google has said was being exploited by “politically motivated” attackers against activists. The MS11-026 update fixes the way Windows parses webpages containing MIME-formatted content.

Microsoft also introduced two tools that are designed to thwart malware attacks. One extends a protection known as Office File Validation to older versions of Office. The feature, which was previously available only to users of Office 2010, helps users to identify malicious Office files by scanning and validating them before they are opened.

The second tool is an update to the winload.exe component that helps flag device drivers that have been booby-trapped to install malware.

The patches were released in 17 bulletins, nine of which carried a rating of “critical,” a designation typically reserved for vulnerabilities that can be remotely exploited to install malware or expose sensitive user data. The remaining eight bulletins were rated “important.”

If you just wanna get down to the details of the patches and what was released, you can read the summary from Microsoft here:

April 2011 Security Bulletin Release

Also check this out:

Assessing the risk of the April security updates

And of course SANS always has a useful recap:

April 2011 Microsoft Black Tuesday Summary

Source: The Register

IETF completed the SSL vulnerability fix in January this year and now in August – 10 months after the original release of the flaw – Microsoft has stepped up and fixed it.

The fix is labeled as MS10-049 and categorised as a Critical security vulnerability. Interestingly it also notes that it fixes both a publicly exposed vulnerability and a privately reported bug both in the Secure Channel (SChannel) security package in Windows.

Microsoft has updated a broad swath of products to fix a potentially serious spoofing vulnerability in the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol that secures email, web transactions and other sensitive internet traffic.

The software company on Tuesday released MS10-049 to kill the bug in Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and 12 other versions of Windows that are still under support. The patch updates a part of the operating system known as SChannel, or Secure Channel, which is responsible for implementing SSL, which is also referred to as TLS, or transport layer security.

The weakness first became public in November, when word leaked out that a vulnerability in the underlying protocol used by hundreds of companies allowed attackers to inject text into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. Researchers had been meeting in secret to develop an industry-wide fix before attackers could figure out a way to exploit it.

Microsoft’s update follows the revision in January of RFC 5246, the request-for-comments document that previously mapped out the technical specifications for the protocol. The new controlling blueprint for SSL/TLS communications is RFC 5746. Since then, other packages, including OpenSSL, RedHat Linux and Oracle’s Java, have also been patched.

The vulnerability is pretty widespread as it covers both Windows 7 – their latest OS and 12 other versions of Windows which Microsoft still supports. It’s marked as critical on 5 versions of Windows, which means it allows remote code execution and the rest it’s marked as important as it allows spoofing.

I’m guessing most large corporates running Windows systems will be pushing out this patch ASAP, especially those that rely on SSL for daily business – those in eCommerce would be the likeliest to find this kind of attack a real risk.

“Ten months after public disclosure the majority of the industry has a fix,” said Marsh Ray, a software developer at two-factor authentication service PhoneFactor and one of the researchers who first sounded the alarm. “I think it’s about as good a time as any to declare victory on that project.”

Microsoft rated the severity of the vulnerability as “important,” the second-highest classification on its four-tier scale. The bulletin correctly said the SSL vulnerability could be exploited only in concert with another attack – such as ARP spoofing or DNS cache poisoning – that allowed someone to perform a man-in-the-middle attack.

“It is important to note that this is still potentially a significant issue for certain deployments, and the update should be installed,” Maarten Van Horenbeeck, a program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote here. “In particular, the vulnerability may affect other non-HTTP protocols that are less well understood.”

The vulnerability in the older protocol stems from the ability for either party in an SSL transaction to renegotiate the session, usually so one of them can refresh its cryptographic keys or change other parameters. That could allow man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session.

The latest Patch Tuesday from Microsoft has been a bit of a record breaker with 14 security patches for at least 34 separate vulnerabilities.

This closely follows more disclosed bugs in Adobe PDF related products following their latest patches for other critical rated vulnerabilities.

Source: The Register

So the other big news this week apart from the AT&T iPad/iPhone 4 screw-up is that a recently announced critical vulnerability in Windows XP is being exploited in the wild.

It was disclosed fairly recently and is a vulnerability in the Windows XP help system disclosed by Tavis Ormandy, a Google researcher who has appeared on this site quite a number of times.

It’s dangerous because a victim can be compromised completely (including remote code execution) just by visiting a malicious web page.

Five days after it was disclosed in a highly controversial advisory, a critical vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system is being exploited by criminal hackers, researchers from anti-virus provider Sophos said on Tuesday.

The flaw in the Windows Help and Support Center was disclosed on Thursday by researcher Tavis Ormandy. His public advisory came just five days after he privately informed Microsoft of the defect, prompting fierce criticism from some circles that he hadn’t given the software giant adequate time to fix the hole. That made it easier for attackers to target the bug, which allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable machines when a user views a specially designed webpage, the critics howled.

According to Sophos, researchers have seen the first case of a website using the vulnerability to install malicious software on victim machines. “This malware downloads and executes an additional malicious component (Troj/Drop-FS) on the victim’s computer, by exploiting this vulnerability,” they warned.

Well there’s some discussion on the issue going on about responsible disclosure with people saying Tavis made the advisory public too quickly after informing Microsoft. It’s a fair comment considering Microsoft and it’s Patch Tuesday policy which limits the speed in which they can push patches out.

We all know how often Microsoft pushes out-of-bound patches out, very rarely if at all.

Add the fact that Windows XP is coming to the end of it’s life-cycle soon, it’s unlikely they are going to be scrambling to get a patch out.

Microsoft soon amended its own advisory on the vulnerability to say researchers are “aware of limited, targeted active attacks that use this exploit code.” Although the vulnerability also afflicts Windows Server 2003, Microsoft’s advisory said that OS wasn’t “currently at risk from these attacks.”

Ormandy’s advisory has reignited the age-old debate over full disclosure, in which researchers publish complete details of a vulnerability under the belief that it is the best way to ensure a company fixes it quickly. Ormandy has defended his decision to give Microsoft just five days of advanced warning saying in a recent tweet: “I’m getting pretty tired of all the ’5 days’ hate mail. Those five days were spent trying to negotiate a fix within 60 days.”

Users of XP and Server 2003 should consider disabling features within Help Center that allow administrators to remotely log onto machines.

Oh well, the debates about disclosure will rage on I guess, either way it’s out there now and it’s being exploited in the wild – so as of now it’s a real risk.

For individual users you can use the online application from Microsoft here:

Vulnerability in Help Center could allow remote code execution

Source: The Register

It’s not the first time Microsoft has had some issues with Firefox and add-ons they installed on users machines through Windows Update.

Back in October of last year, Mozilla forcefully disabled a .NET add-on as it was causing ‘instability’ rather a security/vulnerability issue. I did notice the issue with my own Firefox and also noticed that Microsoft likes to install their add-ons with NO uninstall button, which is dodgy in my books.

If they did it in IE, it wouldn’t be so bad as it’s their own product and if people choose to use it they have the rights to update it. But pushing their badly written add-ons into a 3rd party browser and not even giving people the change to uninstall them? That’s just wrong.

Microsoft has silently slipped a Firefox extension onto user machines via an automatic software update. Again.

This week, as part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Redmond released an update for its various browser toolbars, and as Ars Technica noticed, this update also installed an entire add-on for Internet Explorer and an extension for Mozilla Firefox – without asking users. Ars was unable to identify the installs, but Microsoft now tells The Reg that the update was installing the latest version of its Bing toolbar on machines that were running the older Windows Live Toolbar or MSN Toolbar.

The company says it has now, um, updated the update, and the silent toolbar install no longer occurs. The company calls the silent install “a bug.”

“We discovered a bug in the latest update that was installing the Firefox extension for users with the Windows Live Toolbar and MSN Toolbar (specifically people who have not upgraded to the latest version of the Bing Bar),” the company tells us. “We fixed the update so that going forward folks who still have only the older Windows Live Toolbar or MSN Toolbar will not see this behavior anymore.”

Oh so now a silent install is a bug? Usually people label it as spyware or malware. With the kind of marketshare Bing currently has – I’m really not surprised Microsoft is resorting to these kind of tactics.

The worst part seems to be, may users have removed it by following the Technet instructions…and it just keeps coming back and silently reinstalling itself!

But then it’s a risk you take, if you are using a Microsoft OS…you have to deal with this kind of behaviour. You can’t even escape their crapware by using a 3rd party browser!

The company apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Microsoft says that the update was supposed to include only its Search Enhancement Pack, a shared component used by the Windows Live Toolbar, MSN Toolbar, and Bing Bar. The Pack, the company says, enables certain toolbar features, such as the search suggestions drop down. The update was originally tagged with the Search Enhancement Pack label, but it also installed the Bing toolbar on certain machines.

The update was marked “important,” not “optional.” And Firefox users at MozillaZone weren’t too happy about the silent extension install. “I am still annoyed that Microsoft thinks it is ok to arbitrarily tack on something to my FF browser WITHOUT asking, and worst of all, disabling the Uninstall button! Why do they keep doing stupid things like that?!” says one posted.

Users were similarly peeved a year ago, when a service pack for the .NET Framework silently pushed a Firefox add-on. This add-on – Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant – enabled .NET apps to be installed with one click. It also shipped with a disabled uninstall button.

Seems like Microsoft are making a lot of excuses this time and why on earth is the update marked as important and not optional? Surely if it’s just a browser search add-on it should be optional, it’s not a security flaw so for most people it’s certainly not important.

Another reason why people who care switch to Linux, I wouldn’t say Linux or Mac…because Apple have a tendency to do the exact same thing with iTunes and QuickTime.

Source: The Register

What a massive mother-load of patches Microsoft has unleashed on this month patching more than 34 security vulnerabilities including the fairly high profile vulnerability exploited at the Pwn2Own contest earlier this year in April.

Good news as long as all the average Internet users actually use Windows Update and install the latest patches, which somehow I find extremely unlikely. It’s also good news for corporates stuck using Microsoft solutions as long as they have a good patch management solution for their network.

Microsoft on Tuesday patched at least 34 security holes in a wide range of software, including a bug in its Internet Explorer browser that fetched a researcher $10,000 at a hacker contest in April. In all, Microsoft released 10 bulletins, three of which were rated “critical” because they allowed attackers to remotely install malware on victim machines. Other affected products include Windows, Office, Internet Information Services, and SharePoint.

The IE update fixes a vulnerability that fetched Peter Vreugdenhil, a researcher with Netherlands-based Vreugdenhil Research, $10,000 during the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver. He was able to take full control of the Windows 7 machine despite protections known as DEP, or data execution prevention, and ASLR, or address space layout randomization.

It’s pretty rare there’s 3 critical vulnerabilities in one shot, but well we are talking about Microsoft aren’t we. They seem to getting their act together when it comes to patching, perhaps the pressure from Firefox fixing things so quickly is getting to them.

Even Safari is kicking their ass when it comes to fixing problems. But that’s the inherent problem with Microsoft, they have so many projects and platforms, so much spaghetti code and legacy issues it prevents them from releasing stable patches in a timely manner.

They are designed to mitigate the severity of software bugs by randomizing the memory locations of code and preventing code loaded into memory from being able to be executed. Vreugdenhil was able to bypass those protections by combining two separate vulnerabilities.

The Microsoft fixes came the day after Apple fixed almost 50 vulnerabilities in its Safari browser, including a decade-old history leak that still plagues all other browsers. Microsoft has a summary here.

Safari also unleashed a massive update this past Monday including fixing the history leak we wrote about recently.

There’s also a very details report from SANS here detailing each patch, the relevant KB article and CVE number.

June 2010 Microsoft Black Tuesday Summary

Source: The Register

Many users are expecting a patch for the Microsoft IIS Semicolon Bug, but from the recently published bulletin by Microsoft it seems that is highly unlikely during this patch cycle.

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for January 2010

It seems they will only be pushing out a fairly low priority fix which is rated critical only for Windows 2000 users.

In its first Patch Tuesday of the year, Microsoft is planning to plug a Windows security hole rated critical for Windows 2000 systems. A fix for a Server Message Block protocol vulnerability is still being worked on, Microsoft says.

Microsoft is kicking off the new year with a single Windows security bulletin. The first Patch Tuesday release of 2010 will contain a fix rated “critical” for Windows 2000 users and low for others. According to Microsoft’s pre-Patch Tuesday notification, the bulletin addresses a remote code execution vulnerability, and the exploitability index—the rating system that predicts the likelihood of a successful exploit—is not high.

The single bulletin means that a fix for the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol vulnerability the company warned users about in November is not on the menu to be fixed by Jan. 12. According to Microsoft Security Program Manager Jerry Bryant, the company is still working on the issue.

The critical SMB bug we published back in November is not slated to be fixed either.

So as usual, disable public access to your SMB ports! And of course…don’t hold your breath for a fix, if we’re lucky it may get rolled into the February patch cycle.

“We are not aware of any active attacks using the exploit code that was made public for this vulnerability and continue to encourage customers to follow the guidance in the advisory which outlines best practices to help protect systems against attacks that originate outside of the enterprise perimeter,” Bryant wrote on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

Microsoft is also not releasing a patch for the IIS (Internet Information Services) problem reported in late December. According to Microsoft, the issue is not an actual vulnerability in IIS 6.0, but an inconsistency in how it handles semicolons that can only be exploited if IIS is configured in a vulnerable setting.

This month’s Patch Tuesday release is slated to be available at 1 p.m. EST, Jan. 12.

Not being aware of any public exploitation isn’t really a valid excuse is it? Since when do blackhats go around telling everyone exactly what they are up to?

People could and probably are getting pwned left right and center and no one will have any idea how.

They are skating around the IIS issue too, even if it’s a vulnerability caused by settings (yes settings can mitigate it) they should push out something to solve the problem (an updated config for example).

Source: eWeek

Another reason for Windows users to hate the Microsoft Patch Tuesday policy,

The exploit isn’t 100% reliable but it’s still fairly significant in my eyes as it is a critical vulnerability and can be used for code execution.

Vista isn’t the most popular OS still so perhaps Microsoft don’t the threat being that wide as the protocol this exploit focuses on (SMB 2) was only introducted in Vista.

A security researcher has downplayed the significance of publicly released attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in newer versions of Windows, saying it isn’t reliable enough to force Microsoft to issue an emergency patch.

The exploit, which on Monday was folded into the open-source Metasploit penetration testing kit, is at best successful only 50 percent of the time, said Dave Aitel, CTO of security firm Immunity. Given the burden of releasing out-of-schedule patches, Microsoft is unlikely to do so in this case.

“To move something like Microsoft you’ve got to have something major and this isn’t quite it,” Aitel, whose company released its own attack code two weeks ago. “It’s going to be a lot of work to take the exploit where it is to something that works enough that they will do that.”

It seems like the exploit is more reliable with Windows on VMware, but honestly how commonly do you see that? With a real native Windows installation they are only seeing a 10% success rate.

Which really isn’t that serious is it?

Apparently Immunity have made it much more reliable, but they have poured a ton of resources into it.

The vulnerability, which surfaced three weeks ago, resides in file-sharing technology called SMB2, short for server message block version 2, which was first added to Windows Vista and later made its way into newer versions of the operating system. While the Metasploit exploit is sophisticated, it is frequently thwarted by a security measure known as ASLR. Short for address space layout randomization, it picks a different memory location to load system components each time the OS is started.

Without being able to predict where required code will be located, the Metasploit attack isn’t reliable enough to prompt Microsoft to take the drastic step of releasing a patch outside of the regularly scheduled update cycle. The software giant adopted the patch routine to make life easier on system administrators by allowing them to plan and test updates before installing them on huge numbers of business critical machines.

The Metasploit exploit in many cases is able to get around ASLR by targeting memory locations that are predictable when Windows is running on VMware. But when the exploit targets the OS running directly on a computer, the success rate can be as low as 10 percent.

Microsoft will patch this eventually, but I doubt it’ll be soon and they definitely won’t be rushing an out-of-schedule patch out just for this vulnerability.

The question is can the bad guys fashion this into a reliable exploit and get some major ownage going on?

Source: The Register

It seems a new, fairly serious flaw has been discovered in Internet Explorer 7 – and as accounts go it’s been around for a couple of months in the underground.

The worrying part is, patch Tuesday was yesterday and after testing it’s been discovered that this flaw WAS NOT patched in the updates.

ISC reports that it’s not currently widely used, but it has been found in the wild.

Microsoft said it is investigating reports that a new exploit is going around that takes advantage of an unpatched security hole in Internet Explorer 7.

The SANS Internet Storm Center, which tracks hacking trends, said today that while the exploit does not appear to be widely in use at the moment, that situation is likely to change soon, since instructions showing criminals how to take advantage of this flaw have been posted online.

SANS emphasizes that this vulnerability is not one that was fixed in the massive bundle of patches that Microsoft issued yesterday. It is not clear what steps users can take to protect themselves against this threat, other than to browse the Web with something other than IE, such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera. This appears to be the type of vulnerability that could be used to give attackers complete control over an affected system merely by convincing users to browse to a specially-crafted hacked or malicious Web site.

It seems the safest thing is not to use IE, which I personally have been doing since about 1998 anyway. But still, some people claim they have problems with Java or JavaScript or AJAX enabled sites with Firefox.

There’s always Opera, or even the new Google Chrome.

This exploit is a serious one as someone only needs to visit the site and remote code can be injected into their OS and executed.

According to SANS, the exploit works against fully-patched Windows XP and Windows 2003 systems with Internet Explorer 7.

In a statement e-mailed to Security Fix, Microsoft said once it is done with its investigation, the company “will take appropriate action to help protect customers. This may include providing a security update through the monthly release process, an out-of-cycle update or additional guidance to help customers protect themselves.”

Once again it’s demonstrated how stupid ‘Patch Tuesday’ is and how half of the people on the Internet are going to be vulnerable to this serious flaw until the first Tuesday in January.

I really hope Microsoft pushes out an emergency patch outside their schedule ASAP.

You can find a list of the sites known to be distributing the code on Shadowserver here.

Source: Security Fix

Now this doesn’t happen all that often, it must be really serious! An Out-of-Band patch from Microsoft (since it’s famous ‘Patch Tuesday‘ it only releases patches on the second Tuesday of each month) has been released for a new RPC flaw.

I’d imagine it’s similar to the RPC flaw that spawned such disasters as Blaster and Sasser in 2003/4.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Microsoft has released an emergency security update for a broad swath of its users that patches a critical security hole that is already being exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability – which has been subjected to “limited, targeted attacks” – could allow miscreants to create wormable exploits that remotely execute malicious code on vulnerable machines, Microsoft said. No interaction is required from the end user. It was the first patch released outside Microsoft’s regular update cycle in 18 months.

“This is a remote code execution vulnerability,” Microsoft’s out-of-band advisory warned. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system remotely.”

There is an active piece of malware in the wild using this, F-secure has already detected it and has a signature for Trojan-Spy:W32/Gimmiv.A.

This may have been running around in the wild for some time, perhaps in the underground community. There are always true remote exploits that are unknown to the mass community used by certain higher level groups.

This is the sixth time Microsoft has issued and out-of-band security update since October 2004 when it implemented its policy of releasing patches on the second Tuesday of each month, a company spokesman said. The last time an unscheduled patch update was issued was in April 2007 when it moved to fix a critical bug in the ANI animated cursor feature of Windows.

Thursday’s bulletin also marked the second time Microsoft has offered additional vulnerability details to security providers in advance. About an hour before the patch was released publicly, members of the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) received a briefing that allowed them to create signatures that detect exploits in anti-virus software and intrusion prevention systems.

Microsoft also offered a stunning amount of detail about the vulnerability to regular Joes here.

It’s only the 6th time this has happened since October 2004 (around 4 years) so you can see that it’s serious and you better install it across any networks you administer.

The update will require a reboot (as usual..).

Source: The Register