Old and new zero-day vulnerabilities to remain unpatched.
Microsoft
‘s monthly
Patch Tuesday
update release sees seven security patches for
Windows
operating systems and products, three of which are marked as critical. These include fixes for
Visual Studio
,
Internet Explorer
and
Windows Media Player
, the last of which, a fix for the .ASX and .ASF handling vulnerability which has been subject of some debate in recent days, was added to the set of updates previously scheduled for yesterday’s release.
Fixes for the
Word
vulnerability
revealed last week
, along with another which has emerged in the last few days, are not included in the list despite exploits being known to exist for the flaws.
The earlier
Word
vulnerability has been recorded under a
Microsoft Security Advisory
, which can be found
here
, while the second is so far only mentioned in a
Security Response Center
blog entry,
here
(a
Secunia
alert is
here
). The new attack is thought to affect
Word 2000
,
Word 2002
,
Word 2003
and
Word 2003 Viewer
, with older versions and
Word 2007
not subject to the vulnerability. Both are thought to be in the wild, with so far only ‘limited and targeted attacks’ logged by security watchers.
‘
Microsoft
‘s advice to minimise the danger of attack is to follow standard safe computing precautions, take care when receiving documents from unknown or unexpected sources, run up-to-date anti-virus software and ensure all the latest official security patches are applied,’ said
John Hawes
, Technical Consultant at Virus Bulletin. ‘At least one of these steps will provide little protection from the current
Word
threats. Let’s hope
Microsoft
will once again break their monthly cycle, and get the products their users are running patched up and secured as soon as possible.’
Full details of the December patches are available in the
Microsoft Security Bulletin
,
here
.
Posted on 13 December 2006 by
Virus Bulletin
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