Patch Tuesday: Five Critical

Security managers and operation teams will be greeted with a handful of significant Microsoft patches when they return to work Tuesday afternoon. Unfortunately for them, the most aggravation and the significant danger may come from the patch that isn't on the docket.While most of us were thinking about what we're going to do over the long holiday weekend, Microsoft delivered its advance security notification on Thursday. That notification details that all five of the patches address "remote code execution" flaws in Windows. Four of the bulletins affect all supported versions of Windows, while one bulletin may not involved Vista or Server 2008. Expect a lot of system reboots, as all may require a system restart. Since all of these flaws are reportedly remotely exploitable and affect all currently supported versions of Windows, it's best to prepare to patch right away and assume functioning exploit code will surface faster than one can say Windows 7.

However, there is a known issue with versions (of which plenty are still running) of Internet Information Systems (IIS) software. Exploit code for this flaw is already available, and Microsoft's Jerry Bryant posted this blog that said Microsoft software engineers are diligently working on a fix:

In related news, you will note that the ANS does not specify an update for the Internet Information Services FTP service vulnerability for which we released security advisory 975191 on Tuesday of this week. As noted in an earlier blog post, we have spun up our SSIRP (Software Security Incident Response Process) process to address this issue and our teams are working hard to produce an update.

InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn, on Friday, reported that Microsoft enhanced its warning on Internet Information Services software, stating that the vulnerabilities don't just affect older IIS versions but:

Based on additional proof-of-concept exploits that could allow denial-of-service attacks and on limited attempts to exploit the vulnerability, Microsoft now says that IIS 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, and 7.0 are vulnerable to a denial-of-service attacks.

So, let's hope a workable patch comes fast.