Welcome to 2007! Before we get started, I'd like to wish you all a happy, healthy, and safe year from the DeepSight research teams here at Symantec. May all your plans come to fruition, and may all your patches apply smoothly... This month's patch release by Microsoft is a little lighter than previous releases, and lighter even than initially projected by Microsoft themselves. On January 4th, as per their usual policy, they publicly released high-level details of the planned release. The initial advance notification mentioned eight patches. However, the notification was later modified to list only four releases. Included among the delayed releases are fixes for various Word issues. The updates for January that did make the cut cover 10 distinct vulnerabilities, which were primarily file-based, client-side issues in the Office suite.
All aboard! Welcome to another ride on the monthly Microsoft patch train. We’ve got quite a few stops this month and most are client-side vulnerabilities, meaning that an end user has to take specific actions (typically by obtaining and then opening hostile content). Unless otherwise stated, the privilege granted to the attacker for all of the below vulnerabilities is the privilege level of the victim user. Most were publicly disclosed for the first time today, but the exceptions are noted. They are listed below in the order of most to least critical for the fabled “typical” network.
Vulnerability in SNMP Could Allow Remote Code ExecutionMS06-074 / KB926247
This vulnerability seems almost old-fashioned in the modern security landscape – a common buffer overflow in a...
Microsoft released six security bulletins this morning, covering a total of 11 distinct security vulnerabilities. In rough order of most urgent to least, here we go:
Topping the list in raw urgency is MS06-066 (BID 21023 and BID 20984, CVE-2006-4688 and CVE-2006-4689). This affects everything from Win2K SP0 to XP SP2, provided that the systems have the Client Service for Netware enabled. This obviously reduces the population of vulnerable systems, but for those systems this is where you want to start. This addresses two vulnerabilities, the more severe of which is the Microsoft Windows Client Service For Netware Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. If your computers match that description, you are wide open to remote attackers, who have the opportunity to run code of their choice on your machines – until you apply the patch, of course. The...
This month is a busy one, with 10 updates in total, fixing 27 distinct vulnerabilities. Of the 10 updates, seven of them are listed as “Critical” by Microsoft. Interestingly, all seven of them are intended to patch various client-side vulnerabilities—four of them in the Office suite.
Critical bugs:
The patched Office vulnerabilities are all file-format vulnerabilities that will allow an attacker to run the code of their choice on the victim machine, provided a user on that machine opens the malicious file.
There are patches for Powerpoint (MS06-058: BIDs 20322, 20304, 20325, 20226), Excel (MS06-059: BIDs...
Well, once again we find ourselves faced with the monthly ritual known as "Microsoft Patch Day”. This time around the ordeal is relatively minor, with only three new items in the bucket. Two of these items could potentially result in attacker-supplied code being run on a target system, but both are reliant on other limiting factors, which greatly reduce the global stress level associated with Patch Tuesday. All items, of course, are still worthy of close inspection by any admin to see if they apply to the machines and networks that they are responsible for.
The first issue we’ll address in this blog is the PGM overflow vulnerability (MS06-052, CVE-2006-3442, BID 19922). This is the most severe of the issues presented this month because it allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code remotely on the affected system. So then, what’s the good news? Well, the affected code is in MSMQ3.0...
