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