MS Monthly Patch Omits Word Zero-Days

bungee jumper writes "Microsoft released four bulletins with patches for 10 vulnerabilities but there are no fixes for known MS Word zero-day flaws that are under active attack, eWeek.com reports. The January batch covers critical bugs in Excel, Outlook, and Windows. The first confirmed Windows Vista flaw, a denial-of-service issue that was publicly released on an underground hacker site in Russia, also remains unpatched." eWeek notes that Microsoft originally scheduled eight bulletins for release, but pulled four last Friday without explanation.

Comments

Local elevation of privilege

[GIL_Dude]

Local elevation of privilege is now considered a DoS attack on Vista? I guess even submitters don't have to RTFA here anymore to get published. I did read the article though since I was worried about any DoS attack for Vista and wanted to see what ports, processes, etc. it was using. All that was there though was a local only elevation of privs (where an authenticated user logged on to the box can get admin rights). Not good of course, but far from a DoS...

Re:Local elevation of privilege

[Osty]

Local elevation of privilege is now considered a DoS attack on Vista? I guess even submitters don't have to RTFA here anymore to get published.

The submitter read the article, and then directly lifted that line right out of it. Is the submitter an idiot for confusing local privilege escalation with DoS? No, because he wasn't the one who made that claim. Is the article author an idiot for making that statement? Definitely. Is the submitter an idiot for directly quoting the article without attributing it as a quote, thus passing it off as his own words and thoughts? Absolutely.

Default application

[Bob54321]

I just installed these updates and what I want to know is why updating Outlook makes it your default email application. I know I just have to click OK when I start Thunderbird again but it is annoying that I should even have to do that.

Re:Skewed statistics

[Kobold Curry Chef]

Actually, it's one patch that fixes five different vulnerabilities (CVE-2007-0027 through CVE-2007-0031). Some of these vulnerabilities appear in five different versions of Excel or Works; other appear in as few as three. So eWeek is closer to the truth than you think.

Re:Outlook Express flaw?

[Anonymous Coward]

the image is embedded in the email. thunderbird has the same "issue."

Details

[jginspace]

I've got into the habit of saving Microsoft's advance notifications using the wonderful Scrapbook extension.

Here's the original:

• Three Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. Some of these updates will require a restart.
• One Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Visual Studio. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. These updates will require a restart.
• One Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. These updates may require a restart.
• Three Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Office. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. These updates may require a restart.

In the end there was only one Windows patch - a critical flaw in VML - along with critical patches Outlook and Excel. The only 'important' patch was for Office 2003 but seemed to only affect the Brazilian Portugese version.

I was surprised to find, following the TFA, that eWeek got hold of this last Friday.

Re:What the hell does "Zero-day" mean, anyway?

[Bacon Bits]

"Zero-day" is an exploit classification.

It goes like this. Software has bugs. These bugs can cause security vulnerabilities, which are then published and patches issued to fix the vulnerabilities. Hopefully, all this happens before the black hats can take advantage of -- or exploit -- these vulnerabilities.

An exploit of a vulnerability is the virus, worm, SQL injection, hack attempt, etc. itself. An exploit can be labelled "zero-day" when an in-the-wild exploit has been detected on the same day that the vulnerability was made known to the security industry. Most often, "zero-day" means "we learned there was a vulnerability when we found this exploit". This is rather like finding out the locks on your doors don't work when a thief has already been and gone. Zero-day exploits then will have a maximal timeframe to affect vulnerable systems since no work has been done on fixing the vulnerability (presumably).

The Slammer worm, for example, was an [i]exploit[/i] of MS SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 2000 had a buffer overflow vulerability which was the subject of Slammer. Slammer was not zero-day, however, since this security vulnerability had been known about for many months and MS had already issued patches for it (six months prior to Slammer).

The vast majority of exploits are *not* zero-day, but uninformed reporters for computer news services (like CNet, or anything Ziff Davis owns) are now using "zero-day" as a synonym for "new vulnerability" instead of the proper "new exploit to unknown vulnerability".