If you follow the blog, you’re surely aware that today’s Microsoft Patch Day; and it’s an especially important one. Though it doesn’t set any records, Microsoft has released an update to fix a fairly significant, zero day Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerability, which many attackers have exploited in the wild for the past few weeks. If you can only apply one patch today, I recommend the IE one.
In their summary post, Microsoft shares details about eight security bulletins that fix 27 vulnerabilities in many of their popular products. They rate half the bulletins as Critical, and the other half as Important. Here’s the breakdown of affected products:
- Internet Explorer (IE) [10 issues fixed]
- Windows and its components [12 issues fixed]
- Office products [5 issues fixed]
- SharePoint Server
- Word
- Excel
If you use any of these products, you should update as soon as possible. As mentioned earlier, I recommend you install the IE update first; and try to get to it as quickly as you can. Though Microsoft previously released a FixIt for this issue (which I hope you’re running), it’s better to be safe than sorry. That said, don’t discount the other Critical updates. In general, I recommend you download, test and deploy all of Microsofts patches as soon as you can. For more details on today’s Patch Day, check out the October bulletin summary, or wait for our detailed alerts.
On the subject of patching, today is also Adobe patch day too. They’ve released updates to fix Reader, Acrobat, and Robohelp. I’d also recommend you install those updates (the Reader one likely affects most people) as soon as you can. You can learn more about Adobe’s updates on their security page, but I’ll release an alert about them later today.
We’ll share more details about Microsoft’s bulletins in upcoming alerts, posted throughout the day. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)