As you probably noticed, yesterday was Microsoft’s Patch Day. Hopefully, you saw our alerts for the most important October security bulletins, and have already gotten a start patching them. If not, you can find our Internet Explorer and consolidated Windows alerts here:
However, if you follow along with Microsoft’s bulletin releases, you may have noticed we left put two bulletins.We try to restrict our major LiveSecurity alerts to products or issues that we feel are relevant to the majority of our audience. A few of yesterday’s bulletins cover flaws in products that we either don’t believe many of our customers use (since we provide great VPN), or that we just don’t think are very popular. Nonetheless, for the sake of completeness, I wanted to quickly mention these bulletins, just in case you use the relevant Microsoft products.
Below is a quick summary of the two Microsoft bulletins we didn’t alert on:
In a nutshell, Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is Microsoft’s VPN Gateway product. Our products already provide great VPN solutions (IPSec, SSL, PPTP, etc), so we don’t think many of our customers use this product. That said, it does suffer from five security flaws, including a relatively significant remote code execution vulnerability. In short, if an attacker can entice a user with access to a UAG server to a malicious web site, she could exploit this flaw to execute code on that user’s computer, with that user’s privileges (usually local admin privileges in Windows).
Microsoft rating: Important
Microsoft Host Integration Server (HIS) is a product that helps connect Windows networks to old IBM mainframes and AS/400 servers. I really doubt a large percentage of my audience has heard of it, let alone uses it (though I could be wrong). Of course, if you do use this server, you should know it suffers from two Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities. By sending specially crafted network packets, an attacker can exploit these flaws to prevent the server from responding to new requests. However, firewalls –like WatchGuard’s XTM appliances– will prevent external users from accessing your HIS server’s ports (TCP 1477 and TCP/UDP 1478) by default; thus preventing this sort of attack.
Microsoft rating: Important
In conclusion, if you happen to use either of these less popular Microsoft products, you should definitely download, test, and install the corresponding updates listed in those bulletins. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)