Glaswegian

Microsoft has broken its own Patch Tuesday record by patching a record 31 vulnerabilities; its previous record of 26 was achieved in October 2006.

The company issued 10 bulletins, six patched some part of Windows, while three patched an Office application or component, and one fixed a flaw in IE. Eighteen of the 31 bugs were ranked critical, Microsoft's most serious ranking in its four-step score, while 11 were tagged as "important," the next-lowest label, and two were judged "moderate."

"This is a very broad bunch," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at security company Qualys, "compared to last month, which was really all about PowerPoint. You've got to work everywhere, servers and workstations, and even Macs if you have them. It's not getting any better, the number of vulnerabilities [Microsoft discloses] continues to grow."

Security experts were all over the map when it came to naming which fixes to deploy first.

"IE's, by far, takes the cake," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. "It's a client-side bug, there are eight CVEs and there's no doubt that it will be exploited."

As Storms said, MS09-019 patches eight separate vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. One of the patches finally plugs the hole that a researcher used in March 2009 to hack IE and walk off with the prize at the "Pwn2Own" challenge.

"If you're running IE8 on Windows XP, or are concerned about intranet-based attacks, I would highly recommend putting this update on your high priority 'to do' list," said Terri Forslof, the manager of security response at 3Com's TippingPoint, the Pwn2Own sponsor.

Although users running IE8 on Vista or even Windows 7 are somewhat protected from the exploit used to cash in at Pwn2Own, Windows XP users have been at risk for months, Forslof added.


http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...&NewsID=117228