Posted by Virus Bulletin on Dec 11, 2008
Bumper crop of patches plus further fix leave known holes open.
This month's 'Patch Tuesday' security bulletin from Microsoft contained eight separate updates, two more than previously announced, covering a total of 28 vulnerabilities. Six of the updates were labelled 'critical', although some sources rate all equally high and find the flaws covered susceptible to allowing unauthorised remote access. A further critical update has been released subsequently as an emergency alert, while several know flaws in Microsoft core software remain unpatched and are believed to have been subjected to attacks in the wild.
The initial release issued on Tuesday contained fixes for Word, Excel, Sharepoint, Internet Explorer, Visual Basic, Windows Search, Windows media components, and the GDI subsystem, while a second set of problems with GDI, first addressed in September as MS08-052, was covered by the out-of-cycle release issued the following day. Known vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and WordPad remain a viable vector for malware authors, who are known to have taken advantage of them with exploits.
The initial bulletin is at Microsoft here, with the later update here and a further summary of the releases at SANS here. Details of the known remaining flaws are at Microsoft here, at Trend Micro here and at SANS here, while comment on the fixes, and the remaining issues, is at The Register here, here and here.
Posted on 11 December 2008 by Virus Bulletin
