Hello, welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch release. This is a larger month—the vendor is releasing 9 bulletins covering a total of 21 vulnerabilities.

Six of this month's issues are rated ‘Critical’ and they affect Internet Explorer, .NET, Windows, and GDI. The remaining issues affect Internet Explorer, Windows, Visio, and SharePoint.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

• Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
• Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
• Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources.
• Never visit sites of unknown or questionable integrity.
• Block external access at the network perimeter to all key systems unless specific access is required.

Microsoft’s summary of the February releases can be found here:
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Hello, welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch release. This is a smaller month—the vendor is releasing seven bulletins covering a total of eight vulnerabilities.

Only one of this month's issues is rated 'Critical' and it affects Windows Media. The remaining issues affect Windows, the kernel, and Microsoft’s Anti-Cross Site Scripting library.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

• Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
• Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
• Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources.
• Never visit sites of unknown or questionable integrity.
• Block external access at the network perimeter to all key systems unless specific access is required.

Microsoft’s summary of the January releases can be found here:
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Hello, welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch release. This is a small month—the vendor is releasing four bulletins covering a total of four vulnerabilities.

Only one of this month's issues is rated ‘Critical’ and it affects the Windows TCP/IP stack. It potentially can be exploited to completely compromise an affected computer. The remaining issues affect Active Directory, Windows Mail, and Windows kernel-mode drivers.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

• Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
• Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
• Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources.
• Never visit sites of unknown or questionable integrity.
• Block external access at the network perimeter to all key systems unless specific access is required.

Microsoft’s...

The group that initially discovered the original Duqu binaries, CrySyS, has since located an installer for the Duqu threat. Thus far, no-one had been able to recover the installer for the threat and therefore no-one had any idea how Duqu was initially infecting systems. Fortunately, an installer has recently been recovered due to the great work done by the team at CrySyS.

The installer file is a Microsoft Word document (.doc) that exploits a previously unknown kernel vulnerability that allows code execution. We contacted Microsoft regarding the vulnerability and they're working diligently towards issuing a patch and advisory. When the file is opened, malicious code executes and installs the main Duqu binaries. The chart below explains how the exploit in the Word document file eventually leads to the installation of Duqu.

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