Patch Tuesday Bottomline – September 2009 – Updated

This month Microsoft released 5 critical advisories, addressing a total of 8 vulnerabilities. The focus is on the Windows Operating System family and all versions are affected. The notable exception is Windows 7 which is a pleasant surprise and most likely an outcome of the additional security measure implemented in this latest version of Windows.

MS09-045 and MS09-047 are client side vulnerabilities affecting indirectly Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. They require user actions for a successful exploit, but attackers have the necessary tools in place to entice users to visit infected web pages and open malicious media files. MS09-048 is a "classical" network vulnerability of a type that we have not seen in a while: it is located in the TCP/IP network stack of Windows 2008 and Vista and can be exploited through the network, however Microsoft rates the exploitation difficulty as high. MS09-049 is a very interesting attack on the WLAN auto-configuration service of Vista and Windows 2008, it requires a malicious Access Point to be in WIFI range, which limits the number of machines that can be attacked at any given time. We recommend that customers focus on MS09-045 and MS09-047 due the high likely hood of exploits.

As previously announced Microsoft did not address the IIS FTP 0-day vulnerability that was made public last week. In addition yesterday a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability in the file sharing protocol (SMB2) of Vista, 2008 and potentially Windows 7. We expect Microsoft to monitor the extent of exploitation of these 2 new vulnerabilities and continue to provide guidance for workarounds.

Update: Microsoft has acknowledged the SMB2 vulnerability and provided a workaround in advisory 975497, suggesting to disable the SMB2 protocol, machines would then fallback to the older SMB protocol for filesharing.

References:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin
• Qualys Security Alert