In its monthly security update, Microsoft plans to release seven patches, including two “critical” fixes, for vulnerabilities in several of its products.
On Thursday, the tech firm published an advance notification for its Patch Tuesday lineup.
Getting top priority were Microsoft's two critical patches, which plug remote code execution (RCE) bugs in Windows, IE, Office and Microsoft Lync. The remaining bulletins, or fixes, addressed software flaws ranked “important” by the tech giant – RCE issues affecting Office, information disclosure bugs impacting Windows and Lync Server, and an issue in Windows allowing denial of service.
Of note, one of the “important” bulletins remediates a tampering problem impacting users.
In prepared email comments to SCMagazine.com, Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7, mentioned the rarity with which vulnerabilities that allow “tampering” appear in Microsoft's Patch Tuesday release.
“There are seven [patches], two critical, five important – one of which is the seldom seen ‘tampering' type,” Ross wrote on Thursday.
“The tampering label on the seventh bulletin may suggest it allows a message to be altered in transit,” he later explained. “Probably a limited scenario for exploitation."
Overall, the security issue most likely to grab administrators' attention this month, is a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2014-1770) affecting IE 8, which was made public in late May by HP's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) team.
The remote code execution flaw, which is expected to be addressed with one of Microsoft's two critical patches this month, was first disclosed to Microsoft in October, keeping with ZDI's 180-day deadline for publicly reporting vulnerabilities.
"This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Microsoft Internet Explorer," an advisory on ZDI's website said. "User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file."
