After last month’s relatively light security update, Microsoft released 16 bulletins to address 34 vulnerabilities. Nine of these bulletins were tagged Critical, while the remaining seven are Important and ranges from fixes issued for bugs in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Silverlight among others. Most of the updates also require a system restart, making deployment a possible issue for IT administrators.
Trend Micro earlier worked with Microsoft in addressing a vulnerability that was addressed in this release, specifically one found in Internet Explorer (CVE-2011-1252). The said vulnerability involves the way IE handles specific strings when sanitizing URLs, and can allow cross-site scripting, possibly leading to information disclosure.
Microsoft also addressed the “cookiejacking” issue in this month’s release. Such an attack may result to an attacker acquiring cookies from a user’s system and accessing the websites that the user has logged into. Microsoft deems that this threat does not pose a high risk, considering the level of user interaction required to successfully conduct an attack. However, as Trend Micro Researcher Robert McArdle said in Contrary to Reports, Cookiejacking Presents a Major Risk, such an attack heavily uses social engineering tactics, which are often subtle, devious and emotive, making them very successful. Hopefully, this update by Microsoft will provide more protection for users.
To keep systems protected, users are advised to visit the related Microsoft pages and apply the security updates immediately. For enterprise users, we offer specific solutions to deal with vulnerabilities. Both Deep Security and OfficeScan with Intrusion Defense Firewall (IDF) plug-in have existing rules that protect users from the vulnerabilities patched in this month’s release.
For more information about this month’s security update, you may read The Trend Micro Threat Encyclopedia.
Additionally, Adobe issued their own batch of security updates for this month with 6 security bulletins to address vulnerabilities in their applications, including Adobe Flash Player, Shockwave Player, Reader and Acrobat. Users are also strongly advised to patch their software as soon as possible.
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