Microsoft Patches 19 Security Holes

[ShyWriter]

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Microsoft Patches 19 Security Holes

Microsoft today issued six software updates to fix at least 19 security holes in Windows and other Microsoft products. Thirteen of those vulnerabilities earned a “critical” rating, which means miscreants or malicious code could leverage them to break into vulnerable systems without any help from users.

Of note in these patches is a critical update for Internet Explorer 9 that fixes three flaws in IE (these bugs do not exist in older versions of IE, according to Microsoft). Other critical updates address extremely dangerous flaws in core Windows components, such as the Windows shell and Windows Kernel; these vulnerabilities are present in nearly all supported versions of Windows.

All of the critical updates earned the most dire marks on Microsoft’s “exploitability index,” which tries assess the likelihood that attackers will devise remote code execution attacks and denial of service exploits within 30 days of a security bulletin release.

Also included among the critical patches is an update for Microsoft’s .NET Framework. I mention this one separately because in the few times I’ve had troubles after applying Windows security updates, a .NET Framework patch has always been part of the mix. My update this time around went fine (albeit a tad slowly) on a Windows 7 system, but if you experience any issues applying these patches, please leave a note in the comments section below.

Other vulnerabilities addressed in today’s update batch include flaws in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). A summary of the bulletins released today is available at this link. Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, has put together a readable blog post with some additional thoughts on the severity and relative urgency of today’s patches.

SOURCE: http://krebsonsecurity.com/

Steve

[ShyWriter]

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UPDATE:

Update, 8:34 p.m.. ET: Several readers have pointed my attention to problems with a non-security update released with today’s batch: KB2750841. According to this thread, KB2750841 seems to be causing issues for users of OpenDNS. This workaround from OpenDNS forum user “gotroot” appears to have worked for most users experiencing problems.

SOURCE: http://krebsonsecurity.com/

Steve..

[Firefox]

I installed these on two windows 7 computers (one 32bit and one 64bit) and had no issues granted I am not using open DNS