No less than 3 security holes

Oct 10, 2007 12:48 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft's monthly patch cycle release of security bulletins on October 9 reveals yet again that the company's latest operating system, although applauded as the most secure version of Windows on the market, is far from being foolproof or perfect. Windows Vista did not manage to get by unscratched, with the mention that the operating system itself is affected virtually indirectly, through the components that ship along with it. A total of three security bulletins impact Vista, two of which have received a maximum severity rating of Critical, because a successful exploit would lead to remote code execution.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-057 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (939653) and Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-056 Security Update for Outlook Express and Windows Mail (941202) together resolve among them a total of four vulnerabilities, out of which the Error Handling Memory Corruption and the Network News Transfer Protocol Memory Corruption security flaws are considered Critical.

"A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Outlook Express and Windows Mail for Microsoft Vista, due to an incorrectly handled malformed NNTP response. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted Web page. If a user viewed the Web page, the vulnerability could allow remote code execution. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the logged-on user", Microsoft informed in relation to the hole in Outlook and Windows Mail.

The remote procedure call (RPC) facility also contains a flaw, this rated only as Important, conducting to Denial of Service attacks, due to the way communication is managed with the NTLM security provider. The vulnerability can be exploited when authentication of RPC requests is performed.

"A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer due to an unhandled error in certain situations. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted Web page. If a user viewed the Web page, the vulnerability could allow remote code execution. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the logged on user," Microsoft added describing the flaw in Internet Explorer.

Along with the patches that have been made available via Windows Update or Microsoft Update, the company also released the October 2007 Security Releases ISO Image, containing all the fixes for the Windows platform, bundled as an ISO image.