Calling all Microsoft administrators. It’s time to spin up your virtual test machines and download, test, and deploy May’s batch of Microsoft security updates. This month’s theme is IE updates; with a focus on a recent IE zero day vulnerability, as well as a continuation of the “use after free” vulnerability theme I commented on last month.
According to their summary post, Microsoft released ten security bulletins today, fixing around 33 security vulnerabilities in many of their popular products. The affected software includes Internet Explorer (IE), Windows and related components, products from the Office suite (Word, Visio, and Publisher), Lync, and Windows Essentials. Microsoft rates the IE updates as Critical, and the rest as Important.
As I mentioned earlier, today’s theme definitely centers around IE. Last week’s security video covered how attackers have recently been exploiting a zero day IE8 vulnerability in the wild—most notably against the Department of Labor web site. One of today’s updates completely fixes this serious flaw. The other IE update continues to fix more “use after free” vulnerabilities, a class of memory corruption flaws that researchers and attackers have focused on lately. I highly recommend you install today’s IE updates immediately, then follow with the Windows and Office updates.
As an aside, Microsoft also released or updated four security advisories today. One of the updates has to do with one of today’s bulletins, but the other three are new. Once you’re finished handling today’s patches, you should check out Microsoft’s security advisory page as well.
We’ll share more details about today’s bulletins in upcoming alerts. Until then, feel free to check out Microsoft’s May bulletin summary. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)
At least Microsoft fixes issues… Would be nice if you did a post on how WatchGuard is unwilling to fix SpamBlocker which has been completely worthless since the release of 11.7.1.
Please see: http://www.watchguard.com/forum/?boardID=FirewareXTMBoard&action=9&read=47977&fid=656
James,
Thanks for your comment. The latest, as I understand it, is that we have released 11.7.2 Update 1. This update has a newer SDK, and other changes, and word from the field is the spam efficacy is good again.
Though we certainly heard issues from the field with the initial release, the latest update has generated mostly positive response.
Thanks for the reply, but if you check the board I listed you will see from the actual experiences of Administrators that the update is not working and that the new spam provider, Mailshell is totally inferior to Comtouch (used on 11.7 and prior). I can personally attest to a 50% increase allowed spam while running 11.7.2 Update1. After one day I was forced to revert back to 11.7. Simply put we all feel betrayed by Watchguard. SpamBlocker was a great product, but is now worthless.
I wish someone there would actually be honest and admit that WatchGuard totally dropped the ball.