Oracle to pour 155 fixes on top of Microsoft and Flash Patch Tuesday

As usual Adobe’s patches for October will fall in line with Microsoft’s this Tuesday, but this month Oracle’s quarterly and enormous list of 155 fixes falls on the same day.

Admins can expect a busy week beginning Tuesday with Microsoft set to release fixes for nine bulletins this month for security flaws in multiple versions of Windows, Office, Sharepoint, web apps and its developer tools.

Microsoft’s advanced notification for October lists three critical bulletins, with the first addressing remote code execution (RCE) flaws in Internet Explorer versions 6 to 11 on all versions of Windows for the desktop, while the impact on Windows Server is rated “moderate”.

Similarly, the second and third critical bugs also address flaws in all versions of Windows that can be remotely exploited.

In total however Microsoft will be fixing five flaws that can be exploited remotely, which usually offer the greatest opportunity for hackers since they can be targeted over a network.

For this reason, security and compliance firm Qualys recommends prioritising the two affecting Office despite Microsoft ranking them as “important” (since user interaction is required for an exploit to work).

CTO of Qualys Wolfgang Kandek noted that Mac OS X users with Office 2011 installed will also need to install the update, but the company hasn’t seen attacks against this application on Macs yet.

As it has since 2012, Adobe will publish its monthly security updates for Flash on Tuesday, however the company hasn’t published advanced details yet.

October is likely to be busier than usual due to Oracle’s quarterly critical patch update — and an unusually large one at that with 155 new fixes — falling on the same day as Adobe and Microsoft’s monthly patches.

The Oracle update also contains fixes for over a dozen vulnerabilities that are remotely exploitable without authentication — that is, over a network without the need for a username and password.

As usual, arguably the most important product to update will be Java SE, with the October update including 25 fixes of which 22 may be remotely exploitable without authentication. The highest Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) for Java is 10 of a possible 10.

Another important fix is on the way for Oracle Database Server, which has one vulnerability among 32 fixes that is remotely exploitable without authentication. The highest CVSS rating for the server is 9.

Oracle Fusion Middleware will also see fixes for 17 flaws, 13 of which are remotely exploitable without authentication. The highest CVSS rating is 7.5.

Oracle MySQL will also receive 24 new fixes, including nine for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. The product’s highest CVVS rating is 8.

A full list of Oracle’s advanced notification for its October critical patch update can be found here.

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.