Qualys Blog

Today Oracle released a total of 299 new security fixes across all product families. It is important to note that it fixed 25 instances of the infamous Apache Struts vulnerability which could allow a remote attacker to take complete control of the server running Struts. The struts fix was applied to 19 instances of Oracle Financial Services Applications along with WebCenter, WebLogic, Siebel, Oracle Communications, MySQL and Oracle Retail.

Oracle also released Patch 25878798 for Solaris 10 and 11.3 which fixed the second Shadow Brokers EXTREMEPARR vulnerability CVE-2017-3622. EXTREMEPARR  has a CVSS Base Score of 7.8, and if successfully exploited allows a local privilege escalation in the ‘dtappgather’ component. The other Shadow Brokers vulnerability CVE-2017-3623 (a.k.a. “Ebbisland” or “Ebbshave”) was previously addressed by Oracle in several Solaris 10 patch distributions issued since January 26^th 2012 and does not affect Solaris 11.

Out of the 299 total fixes MySQL, Financial Services, Retail and Fusion Middleware take the lion’s share of fixes and the distribution is shown in the chart below. Majority of the vulnerabilities in the Financial Services, Retail and Fusion Middleware could be exploited via the HTTP protocol and attackers can take complete control of the system remotely without the need of any credentials.

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Oracle kicked off the New Year with its first installment of the quarterly CPU (critical patch update) for 2017. The update contains fix for 270 security issues across wide range of products. The graph below shows distribution of the update. More than 100 vulnerabilities that were fixed could be compromised by a remote attacker without requiring any credentials. Most remote vulnerabilities could be exploited over the HTTP protocol.

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Oracle released another massive patch update today which fixed 253 security flaws across hundreds of Oracle products.  This year we have seen the updates getting bigger as compared to an average of 161 vulnerabilities 2015 and 128 vulnerabilities in 2014. Many components fixed in today’s release are remotely exploitable. Since most organizations have different teams to patch databases, networking components, operating systems, applications server and ERP systems, I have broken down the massive update in these categories. Other than the exception of Java there are no consumer products and administrators should focus on their individual patching domains.

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Today Oracle released its July critical patch update fixing 276 security issues across hundreds of Oracle products. On average in 2015 Oracle fixed about 161 vulnerabilities per update and the number was 128 in 2014. That makes today’s update the largest and here is a breakdown of the vulnerabilities. Out of the 276 vulnerabilities, 159 can be exploited remotely without authentication, typically over a network without the need of any credentials. The table lists components ordered by the number of issues and description below has details. Since most organizations have different teams to patch databases, networking components, operating systems, applications server and ERP systems, I have broken down the massive update in these categories.

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This week Oracle released their quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU) for April 2016. The CPU addresses 136 vulnerabilities in 49 products, including Java, Solaris, several middleware products, VirtualBox, the MySQL database and the original Oracle database.

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Oracle has published their Critical Patch Update (CPU) for January 2016. The Oracle CPU is quarterly and addresses the flaws in large Oracle’s product line, including their core product the relational database, but also in a large number of acquisitions like Solaris, MySQL, Java and many of the end-user products, such as JDEdwards ERP, Peoplesoft and CRM.

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Update: Kaspersky who is credited with finding MS16-006,the critical Silverlight vulnerability just published their story on how the bug was found. Very interesting, has to do with the Hacking Team breach and coding "standards" – take a look at their blog post for more info. They also made clear that this vulnerability is under attack in the wild and that we are looking at a true 0-day here. This changes our priorities – we now put MS16-006 at the top of our list. Take a look at your installations, see if you have Silverlight installed and address the flaw as soon as possible.

Original: The first Patch Tuesday of 2016 turns out to be low in numbers, but broad and packing quite a punch: six of the nine bulletins are rated critical, including the Windows Kernel and Office bulletins. In addition some rather important products are going End-of-Life and get their last patch update today. Microsoft is retiring support for all older browsers on each platform and will from here on only maintain the newest browser on each version of the OS.

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Oracle published their quarterly critical patch update October 2015 addressing 154 vulnerabilities distributed across 50+ different products. We will give you our read on the update and help with your prioritization.

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Watch Qualys coverage of Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle Patch Tuesday – July 2015

We will be releasing new controls that will require some customers to make changes to their Oracle targets.

For customers that grant granular permissions to allow access to our Oracle assessment capabilities, new CID’s are being released that require additional rights to be granted.  Failure to grant the new rights will result in an error when you assess your Oracle environment.

We are providing advanced notice to give you time to implement these changes.  If you use an account with full read privileges or broader permissions than the minimum privileges recommended in the documentation, you will likely not be affected by this change.

This update will occur no earlier than August 15, 2015 to allow time for updates to your Oracle environment.

Please contact your TAM or technical support if you have any concerns or questions.

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