Monthly and out-of-band issues flood admins’ to-do lists.
The release of this month’s Patch Tuesday security bulletins from
Microsoft
, with a fairly average 10 alerts covering 34 separate vulnerabilities, is accompanied by a number of additional fixes and updates which will keep security admins busy this week.
Adobe
has announced plans to provide an out-of-band patch for a major flaw in their
Flash player
software, while
Apple
is releasing updated versions of
Safari
which include a raft of security fixes.
Of the ten Patch Tuesday bulletins, only 3 are labelled ‘Critical’ by
Microsoft
, those affecting media decompression,
ActiveX
and, as always,
Internet Explorer
. The remaining seven are marked as only ‘Important’ by their creators, although all but one are rated ‘critical’ on at least some types of system on the scale used by
ISC
, as reported in the thorough briefing in the
SANS
Handler’s Diary,
here
.
Microsoft
‘s own descriptions of the patches can be found in the official bulletin
here
.
The latest in the torrent of serious vulnerabilities uncovered in
Adobe
‘s popular product range is a highly-exploitable flaw in the current version of
Flash Player
, which affects users of multiple platforms and will also impact users of version 9 of
Acrobat
and the ubiquitous
Reader
.
Adobe
plan to release a fix for
Flash Player
on
Windows
,
Mac
and
Linux
by tomorrow, but
Solaris
users will have to wait a little longer, while the corresponding patch for
Acrobat
and
Reader
may take several more weeks to arrive.
Older versions of the PDF handling software, and also a release candidate for a new version of
Flash Player
, are thought to be safe from the flaws, but
Acrobat
and
Reader
users can work around the problem by deleting, renaming or otherwise rendering inoperative the
authplay.dll
component which provides
Flash
functionality within PDF documents.
Adobe
‘s advisory is
here
, with a blog post providing more details
here
.
Finally
Apple
‘s big announcement this week has been the latest versions of their
Safari
browser, fixing a swathe of problems noted in previous editions. Most notable among these patches is a fix for a long-known flaw in most browsers allowing malicious sites to harvest history data from the browser, for which
Safari
is one of the first to provide a fix.
Apple
‘s list of vulnerabilities covered by the new releases is
here
, with detailed coverage of the history-harvesting problem in
The Register
here
.
Posted on 09 June 2010 by
Virus Bulletin
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