14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle announced a few minutes ago that they published maintenance releases for all the supported branches of the popular VirtualBox virtualization software, in order to patch the well-known Venom security issue.
After having patched the Venom vulnerability in the VirtualBox 4.3 branch with the 4.3.28 version released on May 14, Oracle released today new maintenance versions for the VirtualBox 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, and 3.2 branches. VirtualBox 4.2.30, 4.1.38, 4.0.30, and 3.2.28 are now out, and all users are urged to update as soon as possible.
"You can find all information related to 'Venom Security Issue' on Oracle VM VirtualBox releases here. It's always suggested, whenever possible, to use our latest Oracle VM VirtualBox major release/maintenance pack," says the Oracle VirtualBox team in today's announcement.
Here's what was changed in the new VirtualBox maintenance releases
As mentioned, all four maintenance updates that were released today for the 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, and 3.2 VirtualBox series include a patch for the Venom security update that was discovered not long ago in the upstream QEMU virtualization software, and improves compatibility with the rdesktop 1.8.3 software.
On the other hand, the VirtualBox 4.2.30 and 4.1.38 updates bring more hardening fixes for Windows hosts, but the former includes many other changes, such as support for Linux kernel 4.0 and fixes for issues on Linux and Mac OS X hosts with activated SMAP (Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) for Intel Broadwell and later CPUs.
VirtualBox 4.2.30 also addresses an application hang that occurred during shutdown when the "iSCSI Over Internal Network" option was activated, repairs a returned size value of the VBE 2.0 PMI function 0Ah in the BIOS support, and fixes issues with Virtual NIC (vNIC) templates when using Crossbow-based bridged networking.
Oracle urges all users of the VirtualBox 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, and 3.2 branches to update to the 4.2.30, 4.1.38, 4.0.30, and 3.2.28 maintenance releases as soon as possible. The aforementioned updates are now available for download from Oracle for the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.