February 2013 Patch Tuesday Preview

Wolfgang Kandek

Last updated on: October 27, 2022

Today Microsoft published its Advance Notice for this month’s Patch Tuesday. But more importantly Adobe released out-of-band a new version of its Flash Player that fixes two vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in the wild on both Windows and Mac OS X. Update your Flash installations as quickly as possible – Users of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 will get their Flash update automatically from Google and Microsoft respectively.

Now back to Microsoft itself. We are looking at a little bit heavier Patch Tuesday with 12 bulletins that will address a total of 57 vulnerabilities. Five of the bulletins have a severity of critical, including bulletin 1 and bulletin 2, which both address Internet Explorer vulnerabilities affecting all versions of IE from 6 – 10, including on Windows RT running on the Surface tablet. Bulletin 3 is a critical Operating System level bulletin for Windows XP, 2003 and Vista, whereas users of the newer versions of Windows will not be affected. Bulletin 4 is the expected Patch to Microsoft Exchange, which uses the Outside-In software library from Oracle that contains critical vulnerabilities and that Oracle updated in last month’s Critical Patch Update (CPU). The last critical vulnerability is covered by Bulletin 12 and affects only Windows XP, so again, users of the newer versions of Windows will be spared from having to apply that patch.

The remaining bulletins are all rated important and are mostly "Local Elevation of Privilege" type of vulnerabilities, meaning that one already has to be on the targeted computer to be able to attack them. One exception is Bulletin 5, which can be used for Remote Code Execution. It affects the FAST Indexing server for Sharepoint and it also caused by Oracle’s update of the Outside In libraries that are used by Microsoft for document conversion processes.

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