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Patch Tuesday
Today is Patch Tuesday, Microsoft’s monthly patch release day. There were 11 new advisories released, with 4 of them critical, 6 important and 1 moderate. The critical patches deal with Active Directory, Internet Explorer, Host Integration Server and Microsoft Excel. These should be applied as soon as possible. Remember to test them on a subset of your servers first to make sure they’re compatible with all of the software you currently run.
For the first time, Microsoft has assigned an exploitability index to each advisory to indicate the likelyhood of a vulnerability being exploited. One of the vulnerabilities is already being exploited (it’s an Internet Printing vulnerability), and many others have a rating of 1 (meaning reliable exploit code is likely). The SANS Internet Storm Center has a good chart of how they rate the risks for server and client systems. The writeup is linked below.
Reference Links:
- SANS Internet Storm Center article (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5180)
- Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for October 2008 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-oct.mspx?pubDate=2008-10-14)