Are you ready for a long week of patching? Microsoft’s August Patch Day is live, with thirteen security bulletins that fix 22 security vulnerabilities in their popular software packages. The flaws affect many Microsoft products, including:
- Windows and its many components (like DNS server)
- Internet Explorer
- Visio
- the .NET Framework
- and Visual Studio.
Microsoft only rates two of the thirteen bulletins as Critical, but this duo of updates fix some pretty serious issues. The worst are probably the remote code execution vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 9 and below. By enticing you to a web site containing evil code, an attacker could exploit many of these IE flaws to launch Drive-by Download attacks. Windows’ DNS Server also suffers from a fairly serious remote code execution flaw, which attackers can leverage by sending specially crafted DNS queries. I’d recommend you patch the IE and DNS server flaws immediately.
The rest of Microsoft’s bulletins fix various Important and Moderate severity vulnerabilities. Though not as bad as the two above, some of these remaining flaws do pose significant risk as well. I recommend you follow the priority recommended in Microsoft’s August summary bulletin. As is normally the case with Microsoft updates, you should probably test the patches before deploying them in your production network — especially the ones that affect server software.
As an aside, Adobe also posted various security patches today, including updates for their Flash and Shockwave software.
We’ll post more detailed alerts about both the Microsoft and Adobe flaws, and how to fix them, over the next two days. – Corey Nachreiner, CISSP