Microsoft has released their security patches and updates for October. If you’re one of the brave few that jump on them as soon as possible, they are ready for the taking (or auto-updating for some).
The theme this month–at least for the Critical rated issues–is web browser related vulnerabilities. Between the eight new vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer (IE), and a .NET Framework/Silverlight flaw, attackers have many new flaws they might target in their Drive-by Download attacks. I recommend you install the IE and .NET/Silverlight updates as soon as you can.
Besides the browser related issues, Microsoft also released updates for the following:
- Various other components that ship with Windows
- Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway
- Host Integration Server
You can learn more about today’s updates in Microsoft’s October 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.
We’ll post more detailed alerts about these Microsoft product vulnerabilities, and how to fix them, very shortly. That said, I likely won’t post an alert about the Microsoft Host Integration Server issue, since I don’t expect many of my readers use it. Nonetheless, if you do use it, you should patch it to correct the DoS vulnerability Microsoft warns that it suffers from. – Corey Nachreiner, CISSP