Microsoft Black Tuesday: The Largest Patch Day of 2013 (So Far)

Today’s Patch Day is the largest so far for 2013, with Microsoft releasing 13 security bulletins. While it doesn’t break any records (that Patch Day was probably the 17 bulletin one in April 2011), it’s still nothing to sneeze at. Here’s today’s patch break down.

Microsoft’s 13 bulletins fix around 47 security vulnerabilities affecting the following products:

• Internet Explorer (IE)
• Windows
• many Office products
  • SharePoint Server
  • Outlook
  • Word
  • Excel
  • Access
  • FrontPage

Microsoft rates four of the bulletins as Critical, and the remaining ones Important. The impacts of these flaws range from remote code execution, elevation of privileges, information disclosure, and denial of service (DoS). For more details, check out the September bulletin summary, or wait for our detailed alerts.

At first glance, you might think the Critical Outlook bulletin is the most severe, and the first you should fix. I mean… gaining control of a user’s system simply by getting them to open an email sounds pretty horrible. However, Microsoft believes that this flaw is technically pretty difficult to exploit.

On the flip side, you might be less worried about the SharePoint issues, since you’d assume most organizations put SharePoint servers behind firewalls. Yet, as it turns out, many organizations provide public access to their SharePoint services allowing external employees easy access; some even disable authentication. My point being, I would apply the SharePoint patches first, assuming you manage SharePoint servers, but would still consider the Outlook update a close second (and don’t forget the Critical IE and Windows updates either).

We’ll share more details about Microsoft’s bulletins in upcoming alerts, posted throughout the day. We’ve posted Microsoft’s update matrix below, for your convenience.  — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)

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