April 2013 Patch Tuesday Preview

Wolfgang Kandek

Last updated on: October 27, 2022

It’s the Thursday before April’s Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft’s Advance Notice has gone live.

There are nine bulletins this month, affecting all versions of Windows, some Office and server components and also Windows Defender on Windows 8 and RT. However only two bulletins are rated “critical”.

Bulletin 1 is for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE), including the newest IE 10 on Windows 8 and RT, and should be on the top of your patching efforts. It is rated “critical” and allows Remote Code Execution through today’s most common attack vector: one of your users browsing to a malicious website. Bulletin 2 is the second vulnerability, rated “critical”, and affects the Windows Operating System, except the newest versions, WIndows 8, Server 2012 and Windows RT (the tablet version).

The remaining bulletins are all rated “important” and affect Windows, the Sharepoint server, — and interestingly a security product — Microsoft’s malware scanner, Windows Defender on Windows 8 and Windows RT. The vulnerabilities  addressed in these bulletins typically allow the attacker Escalation of Privilege from a normal user to an admin level user once they are already on the machine or can trick the user to open a specifically-crafted file.

In other important news, the PostGreSQL Open Source project has published a new version of its database product that addresses five security flaws. One of them, CVE-2013-1899 allows the attacker to delete database files without authentication, leading to data loss and denial of service, and they considered it important enough to warrant last week a pre-announcement of the upcoming release expected this week.

Please keep also in mind that Oracle has scheduled an extra release for Java this month. Normally Java is on a four-month release cycle: February, June and October of each year. Due to the amount and severity of recent vulnerabilities discovered, there will be an additional release that will go live on April 16th.

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