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Microsoft Delivers Nine Security Bulletins for February

Corey Nachreiner

As the second Tuesday of the month, it’s time for Microsoft administrators to get patchin’. You can find this month’s Patch Day details at Microsoft’s February Patch Day Summary page, but I’ll summarize some of the highlights below.

By the Numbers:

Today, Microsoft released nine security bulletins, fixing a total of 60 security vulnerabilities in many of their products. The affected products include:

They rate three bulletins as Critical, six as Important.

Patch Day Highlights:

The most interesting vulnerability this month is probably Microsoft’s Group Policy remote code execution flaw. This is a rather complex flaw that requires an attacker successfully pull off a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack on a computer that is configured to connect to an Active Directory domain. Once the attacker can intercept your traffic, he can trick it into running a malicious login script, which allows him to run anything he wants. Since the flaw relies on a domain login, it primarily affects corporate Windows users. Check out this article to learn more.

Internet Explorer (IE) also got a rather beefy patch, which fixes 41 security flaws. The update mostly fixes memory corruption vulnerabilities that bad guys can leverage in drive-by download attacks. However, this update also includes updates to IE’s SSLv3 handling to mitigate the POODLE flaw. Finally, this update does NOT fix the recent IE11 cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that Google disclosed. That said, I’d recommend you install the IE update first, as web drive-by download attacks are much more popular and targeted than the Group Policy attack mentioned above.

Quick Bulletin Summary:

We summarize February’s security bulletins below in order of severity. We recommend you apply the updates in the same order of priority, assuming you use the affected products.

Solution Path:

If you use any of the software mentioned above, you should apply the corresponding updates as soon as you can. I recommend you apply the Critical updates immediately, try to get to the Important ones as a soon as possible, and leave the moderate ones for last.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We have already read rumors about problems with some of today’s Microsoft updates. We highly recommend you test the patches before applying them to production servers.

You can get the updates three ways:

  1. Let Windows Automatic Update do it for you – While patches sometimes introduce new problems, these occasional issues don’t seem to affect clients as often as they do servers. To keep your network secure, I recommend you set Windows clients to update automatically so they get patches as soon as possible.
  2. Manually download and install patches – That said, most businesses strongly rely on production servers and server software. For that reason, I recommend you always test new server updates before applying them manually to production servers. Virtualization can help you build a test environment that mimics your production one for testing.  You can find links to download the various updates in the individual bulletins I’ve linked above.
  3. Download February’s full Security Update ISO –  Finally, Microsoft eventually posts an ISO image that consolidates all the security updates. This ISO conveniently packages the updates in one place for administrators. You’ll eventually find a link to the monthly security ISOs here, but Microsoft may not post it until a few days after Patch Day

For WatchGuard Customers:

Good News! WatchGuard’s Gateway Antivirus (GAV), Intrusion Prevention (IPS), and APT Blocker services can often prevent these sorts of attacks, or the malware they try to distribute. For instance, our IPS signature team has developed signatures that can detect and block many of the attacks described in Microsoft’s alerts:

Your Firebox or XTM appliance should get this new IPS signature update shortly.

Furthermore, our Reputation Enabled Defense (RED) and WebBlocker services can often prevent your users from accidentally visiting malicious (or legitimate but booby-trapped) web sites that contain these sorts of attacks. Nevertheless, we still recommend you install Microsoft’s updates to completely protect yourself from all of these flaws. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)

 

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