Microsoft took less than a month to incorporate an Oracle Outside In patch and fix a critically rated remote code execution bug in Exchange Servers. The Microsoft patch is among three critical bulletins—eight overall—released today as part of its August 2013 Patch Tuesday security updates.
Oracle patched Outside In with its July Critical Patch Update (CPU); the technology allows developers to turn unstructured file formats into normalized files. MS13-061 includes the Outside In Patch, which is part of the WebReady Document Viewing and Data Loss Prevention features on Exchange Servers. Exploits could allow an attacker to remotely execute code if a user previews or opens a malicious file using Outlook Web App (OWA). The attacker would have the same privileges as the transcoding services on the Exchange Server; that would be the LocalService account for WebReady Document Viewing and the Filtering Management service for the DLP feature. Both, however, run with minimal privileges.
“If you run Exchange and your users have OWA, you should address this issue as quickly as possible,” said Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek. Microsoft also recommends a workaround that turns off Outside In document processing.
MS13-059 is another cumulative patch for Internet Explorer and repairs 11 remotely executable vulnerabilities in the browser, including a sandbox bypass vulnerability discovered and exploited by VUPEN researchers during the Pwn2Own contest in March. IE 6-10 is vulnerable to exploit; Microsoft said it is not aware of any active exploits for any of these vulnerabilities.
The IE rollup includes patches for nine memory corruption vulnerabilities, as well as fixes for a privilege escalation flaw in the way in which the browser handles process integrity level assignment and an information disclosure cross-site scripting vulnerability in EUC-JP character encoding, Microsoft said.
“As usual with IE vulnerabilities, the attack vector would be a malicious webpage, either exploited by the attacker or it could be sent to the victim in a spear-phishing e-mail,” Kandek said. “Patch this immediately as the highest priority on your desktop system and wherever your users browse the web.”
The final critical bulletin, MS13-060, patches a Windows vulnerability in the Unicode Scripts Processor; the patch corrects the way Windows parses certain OpenType font characteristics. An exploit could allow an attacker to run code remotely if a user opens a malicious document or visits a website that supports OpenType fonts.
“A user would have to be induced to open a malicious file and this only affects Windows XP and 2003,” said Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7. “Both of these issues should be patched ASAP.” Microsoft also recommends two workarounds: either modifying the usp10.dll Access Control List to be more restrictive, or disabling support for parsing embedded fonts in IE.
The remaining bulletins were all rated Important by Microsoft.
blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2013/08/13/leaving-las-vegas-and-the-august-2013-security-updates.aspx
threatpost.com/hefty-oracle-july-critical-patch-update-contains-89-patches/101370
www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/cpujuly2013-1899826.html#AppendixFMW
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-059
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-060
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-061
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-062
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-063
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-064
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-065
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-066