Patch Tuesday released closely followed by emergency update

Bumper crop of patches plus further fix leave known holes open.

This month’s ‘Patch Tuesday’ security bulletin from

Microsoft

contained eight separate updates, two more than previously announced, covering a total of 28 vulnerabilities. Six of the updates were labelled ‘critical’, although some sources rate all equally high and find the flaws covered susceptible to allowing unauthorised remote access. A further critical update has been released subsequently as an emergency alert, while several know flaws in

Microsoft

core software remain unpatched and are believed to have been subjected to attacks in the wild.

The initial release issued on Tuesday contained fixes for

Word

,

Excel

,

Sharepoint

,

Internet Explorer

,

Visual Basic

,

Windows Search

,

Windows

media components, and the

GDI

subsystem, while a second set of problems with

GDI

, first addressed in September as MS08-052, was covered by the out-of-cycle release issued the following day. Known vulnerabilities in

Internet Explorer

and

WordPad

remain a viable vector for malware authors, who are known to have taken advantage of them with exploits.

The initial bulletin is at

Microsoft


here

, with the later update

here

and a further summary of the releases at

SANS


here

. Details of the known remaining flaws are at

Microsoft


here

, at

Trend Micro


here

and at

SANS


here

, while comment on the fixes, and the remaining issues, is at

The Register


here

,

here

and

here

.

Posted on 11 December 2008 by

Virus Bulletin