Microsoft Sets Record With Monster Patch Tuesday

CWmike writes "Microsoft today issued 10 security updates that patched a record 31 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Excel, Word, Windows Search and other programs, including 18 bugs marked 'critical.' Of the 10 bulletins, six patched some part of Windows, while three patched an Office application or component, and one fixed a flaw in IE. The total bug count was the most patched by Microsoft in a single month since the company began regularly scheduled updates in 2003. The previous record of 26 vulnerabilities patched occurred in both August 2008 and August 2006. 'This is a very broad bunch,' said Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys, 'compared to last month, which was really all about PowerPoint. You've got to work everywhere, servers and workstations, and even Macs if you have them. It's not getting any better, the number of vulnerabilities [Microsoft discloses] continues to grow.'"

Comments

I'm sure they could do better

[Centurix]

Next tuesday they could double that amount with the right attitude...

Re:Scary Good or Scary Bad?

[powerspike]

Scary good. At least it shows MS is looking for problems, and fixing them as they find them.
If somebody got a full list of bugs / sec updates for linux everymonth (all software), i'm quite sure that "31" would be quite a low number.
Of course MS could ignore them (or some), and come up with a low number, but that wouldn't be in anybodies best interests...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Microsoft is too big to fail

[shanen]

Microsoft has become a single point of failure that poses and unacceptably enormous risk to our society's normal functioning. Consider it in light of the birthday paradox. Even if each failure is 99% safe, sooner or later we're going to have a major Warhol Worm that brings the entire Internet to its knees--along with large portions of the world's economy. Actually, I'd wager that the NSA already has the capability, and probably several other state actors, too.

Massive monoculture is always dangerous. The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.

I'm not saying we should kill Microsoft. Just cut it up into four or five small pieces, give each of them a copy of the source code, and tell them to run with it. No non-public communications permitted, and let the customers actually have the MEANINGFUL freedom to pick and choose. Not only will there be more pressure to produce new versions, but within a few versions we'll have enough diversity to prevent totally massive fails.

Point of clarification: I'm not arguing against standards--but they need to be open and agreed upon, not imposed by and for the sake of monopoly.

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[Daniel Dvorkin]

While I agree that the Windows monocultire is a bad thing, I think it's important to remember that you could kill every single Windows machine in the world and most of the infrastructure than runs the internet would keep humming along quite happily. What's at risk is primarily desktops and corporate (intranet) servers. Losing these machines would be bad, but "brings the entire Internet to its knees" is an exaggeration. Admins would just cut off the infected machines and keep going.

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[shanen]

To the spineless cowardly censorious moron with the negative mod points:

Exactly what part of the post were you unable to understand? If you don't ask questions, you'll just continue being a bloody ignorant twit.

And your mother wore army boots, too.

However, I do thank you for your additional evidence of the quality of most of the moderation on /.--but it was scarcely needed. I've pretty much given up looking for funny or witty posts these days. A moderation of +5 funny apparently means that some moderators recognized at least one of the traditional 'funny' memes in the post.

Me? I've quit playing the moderation game and opted out of moderation long ago. If /. wasn't so poorly programmed, I suppose that might exempt my posts from moderation. Something like 'judge not and be not judged'?

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[shanen]

Acknowledged. I should clarify that I am thinking of a Warhol Worm that includes a rooted backdoor for a large-scale DDoS attack. We've already had plenty of problems with zombots around 10^4, but imagine the hassles of a 10^7 zombot... I don't think it would be possible to simply cut the infected machines off the net, but rather it would be necessary to partition the entire network and rebuild in pieces.

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[wvmarle]

Massive monoculture is always dangerous. The dinosaurs seemed incredibly successful, too, but too many of them were too similar--and look what happened. In diversity there is strength.

In numbers there is strength as well. There is quite some evidence that birds are the living direct descendants of the dinosaurs - and in a way I have always been puzzled on how it would be possible that all dinosaurs would become extinct but other types of animals (mammals, crocodiles) not. Dinosaurs were often huge animals, so relative few numbers before the earth is full. That is more likely to have been their undoing. When 90% gets killed, finding a mate becomes really hard due to the huge distance between individuals.

Windows is so huge in numbers that it is almost impossible to extinct. Almost always there will be some Windows computers surviving somewhere, forgotten on grandma's table, not connected to the Internet even maybe and happily moving on alone. It is impossible to wipe them all out, there are too many of them.

OS/2 is virtually extinct - some installations hanging on for dear life but there were so few of them... BeOS saw the same fate... and so there are more. Dead branches on the tree of evolution, they could not multiply sufficiently to weather the competition.

Windows is of course at risk of disease: all individuals are so similar they can easily infect one another. Some have better immune systems (firewalls, more patches installed) and may survive longer - they may even survive the main onslaught and survive the virus which itself may die out due to not enough hosts left to infect. That is after all what happened to the Spanish Flue: this strain disappeared because in the end all hosts were either immune or had died. There were virtually no fresh hosts available for the virus to survive.

Linux is reaching sufficient numbers now to also be impossible to become extinct, and add to that the large diversity in systems giving the species great immunity. Yes some groups may be vulnerable to a certain virus, others will be immune and sit out the disease. Then the ones killed by the virus will be replaced by new, immune systems and the species as a whole becomes stronger.

At the moment actually I can not think of other operating systems that are as diverse as the Linux platform. BSD is a candidate but only three major flavours available. Windows certainly is no candidate, it's all the same.

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[symbolset]

Why is it these days that when I see the words "too big to fail" attached to a company that I automatically imagine it is secretly burning down from within?

It's not a few compromised hosts. It's several millions under the control of no more than ten people. Any one of them could sht down the Internet, and would if they saw a profit in it.

Re:Microsoft is too big to fail

[Kjella]

Back in the days of the Microsoft worms there was no default firewall and many default network exposed services, find one flaw in something and you could infect pretty much every other Windows machine on the net. They learned from that, and now there's very little chance of a machine being infected unless the machine calls out, either it's checking mail, browsing the web or whatever. Diversification is overrated, pretty much all *nix boxes use OpenSSL so how's that not a major monoculture? Or Apache for web hosting? Find me a remote exploit in the default config with no login info and you'll see full-blown panic in no time. Except that you don't. Nor has there been a major IIS security issue for ages either.

Computers don't act randomly. You minimize the contact area, analyze the heck out of it until you're really, really sure that it's correct with formal proof if you damn well please and then it will act that way. Always. Making five clones only gives you the chance to implement a bug five times more. And if it's really more sensitive than that, there's always firewalling off those entire networks. Code does not travel by magic, in short unless there's a secret port knock the NSA can do to make Windows bring down its own defenses it's not going to happen. Not anymore than I think you can break my Linux box.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[Anonymous Coward]

a list of updates longer then my johnson...

Sounds like it wasn't exactly a matter of great concern then.

The positive side of the Borg icon

[petrus4]

Squashing 31 vulnerabilities in a single patch, is, in a word, efficient. "Embrace and extend," might be a negative part of the Borg ethos, but I give Microsoft credit for displaying the positive side of it, as well. ;-)

Re:The positive side of the Borg icon

[Just Some Guy]

Squashing 31 vulnerabilities in a single patch, is, in a word, efficient.

Well, that's one way to positively spin "sat on patches until there were enough to bother with".

Re:Even Macs?

[TSHTF]

Apple isn't much better. The official security fixes in Safari 4.0, released yesterday, are for a total of _47_ vulnerabilities. Microsoft has a long way to go.

Vulnerabilities?

[Korbeau]

Vulnerabilities? What does this word mean? "31 vulnerabilities, including 18 bugs marked as critical."

In my mind a bug and a vulnerability are 2 different things, one englobing the other.

Let me get this straight ... if you're telling me my computer has a "vulnerability", it means I got chances to get a notepad.exe application start out of nowhere with the words "I've hax0r Ur C8mput8r" or something in my face.

Reading the article I don't know if it's some random critical bug in some MS application, or if it depends of me running a service in X or Y situation and the attacker is in the intranet or whatever, or if I need to go to a very *very* untrusted site that even Avast! won't let me do to get attacked ... please be specific!

Every month or so there is such articles about MS patches ... hell, let's do this with every god-damn software patches around? With Ubuntu you get to install patches every week also! Heck, the Java upgrader thingy pops-up every month too.

What does "vulnerabilities" mean, in this context, seriously? Am I in danger?

Re:Vulnerabilities?

[zonky]

If the user had UAC disabled, they w/could have been owned. Being in the admin group on Vista shouldn't in itself allow a drive by to write files outside the user's home folders. Same if you were running safari with sudo on OSX, or Firefox as root on Linux. Any user running as admin/root is a fool. Of course, if the code you do run in your drive by download can hit a privilege escalation vulnerability on the os, all bets are off....

Re:Vulnerabilities?

[Kjella]

A bug is something not working as intended. Slashdot's rendering on standards compliant browsers for example.
A vulnerability is something that can be exploited by a third party for example to crash, hang or invade your machine.

That in itself doesn't really tell you much, is it locally or remotely exploitable, do you need valid logins, user action etc. which means it can range from trivial to critical. If you want the details, you need to read the details... that is to say MS security bulletins.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[zonky]

Ubuntu is updating all products in all repo's, with a single command/daily check.

The problem with windows is that you're not doing this at all when you check windows update/wsus - you're checking windows only- (other microsoft products if you opted-in to doing this).

This is in fact the real problem with windows- patch management is just a total nightmare.

For example, Adobe also patched today- but can you manage that upgrade at the same time? Nope.

it's mindbogglingly hard at any point in time to say you are patched when running a windows system. This is the greatest challange/weakness of windows, and the biggest benefit of Linux - package management as a means of achieving security.

Re:Even Macs?

[Yvan256]

Safari 4 was beta before yesterday.

This is a good thing

[syousef]

We already know Windows has vulnerabilities and that there are exploits in the wild. The design isn't going to magically change. So the fact that we're getting more patches is a good thing. We can't whine when we don't get patches then whine when we do! My only question is do these patches break any existing functionality, and if so is this clearly documented?

Re:This is a good thing

[wvmarle]

A proper patch would imho only be able to break existing functionality if:

• it changes the behaviour of a publicly documented API (it shouldn't but it can be documented),
• the software providing the functionality uses an undocumented API or uses a bug workaround, the first it shouldn't do in the first place and the second is up for debate whether it's good to do or not.

Changing a documented API should happen only between OS version changes, the second is more likely. And considering the number of bugs and undocumented API calls included in Windows that may well be a serious issue. Documenting the patch will never warn one of these issues: the undocumented API calls are, well, undocumented so technically they do not exist, and it is impossible to know beforehand which bug workarounds there are in software, if any.

So assuming MS writes their patches properly, no documented functionality will change. It may change to what the documents say it does, it may internally change giving the same end result - so no matter the documentation, testing would be the only way to make sure that your specific set of third-party or in-house software still works.

And I'm sure the above accounts for open source software as much as it does for closed source.

Re:M-M-M-M-M-onster Patch! (n/t)

[cupantae]

I was working on the PC late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For bug on windows began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise

THEY DID THE PATCH
They did the monster patch
THE MONSTER PATCH
It was a vulnerability smash
THEY DID THE PATCH
They caught them in a flash
THEY DID THE PATCH
They did the monster patch

From my computer seat in the office east
To the master Ballmer where the vampires feast
The faults all came from their humble abodes
To get a jolt from my electrodes

THEY DID THE PATCH
They did the monster patch
THE MONSTER PATCH
It was a vulnerability smash
THEY DID THE PATCH
They caught them in a flash
THEY DID THE PATCH
They did the monster patch ...and so on. I only really wanted to say that your comment made me sing that song, but really it is way longer than I care to do a half-assed parody.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[gbarules2999]

I've seen Ubuntu ask to install a list of updates longer then my johnson

And probably 90% of them were 120KB libraries, which MS updates but doesn't list.

Is it the new fad to spell "Ubuntu" wrong? It's not that difficult. Add it to Firefox's dictionary if you have to.

Apple Safari Jumbo Patch 50+ Vulnerabilities Fixed

[BSDetector]

So where is the Slashdot article on the following? It's as current as the Microsoft article from ZDNet! I guess as long as it puts Apple in a bad light - it gets ignored or even censored. But if it can be interpreted as Microsoft=BAD then let's up the font size and BOLD the headers!

"Apple Safari Jumbo Patch 50+ Vulnerabilities Fixed" - http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3541/

Hypocrites!

Re:That's a lot of patches

[Compholio]

Does Ubtunu, or any other Linux distro, provide a way to keep proprietary applications patched or updated? Exactly.

Indeed, create your own repository and have your installer add that repository to the list when your application is installed (though you should ask permission or people will get angry with you). From that point on the customer's PC will update your software automatically, it'll even warn the customer to install it quickly if you flag it as a security update.

Re:Scary Good or Scary Bad?

[_Sprocket_]

Scary good. At least it shows MS is looking for problems, and fixing them as they find them. If somebody got a full list of bugs / sec updates for linux everymonth (all software), i'm quite sure that "31" would be quite a low number. Of course MS could ignore them (or some), and come up with a low number, but that wouldn't be in anybodies best interests...

It's always a shame when people use vulnerability / bug counts as some kind of definitive universal metric. The issues involved are much more complex than a single number score. And while the information can be useful, the simplest use is to debunk zealots' (Windows, Linux, etc.) claims that their software of choice is bug-free or that one particular style of development produces better quality code (if you consider bugs signs of defects that count against your quality metric). And even then, the debate could rage on (which I'll avoid doing as that's not the point right now).

Microsoft producing security patches is an overall good thing. Its a battle that was "won" quite a few years ago. And it's a battle that continues as it takes continued pressure to keep them honest (there is a history of bugs being reported to Microsoft w/out fixes over extended lengths of time). Constant pressure nudges Microsoft to resolve these issues. It's an echo of the bad old days when Microsoft cared little about responding to serious flaws in their products.

Likely it's those echos that probably mislead the masses to assume these numbers meant something that they didn't. Back in those aforementioned bad old days, the bug count outlined largely well-documented and unaddressed flaws. Now days a few of those pop up from time to time (and again - it is more common these days for "responsible disclosure" with commercial vendors to uncover flaws that go unpublished until patch release). But for the most part, those numbers represent issues that are addressed. And that is indeed a victory (bittersweet if you contend that the flaws should never have existed).

Oh joy!

[Errtu76]

Microsoft. Windows. Updates. Patches. On slashdot?

*quickly gets the popcorn and F5's the comments*

Oh good one!

*munch munch*

hahahaha funny

*munch*

ooooo

*munch munch*

Re:pan-MS patch

[CountOfJesusChristo]

You're probably a troll, but in case you're simply misguided or poorly informed:

[R]ealize that this is across ALL the stuff - your precious Ubuntu or BSD would never have this many, simply because a distro is not also a browser, office suite, etc.

The point of a distro is that it comes bundled with lots of software. It usually does include a browser, an office suite, an image editor, and more.

It certainly isn't controlled and managed by the same group.

The purpose of a distribution is to have everything managed by a single group. Sure, most -- if not all -- software comes from upstream, but the same single group does manage all of the packaging and updates for the users of said distribution.

btw posting this from an Ubuntu machine, which just pulled down 10 updates.

If you really are posting from an Ubuntu machine, then you should know that the updater will update everything installed by default, and everything installed after-the-fact through the package manager. All other things being equal, distributions like Ubuntu should be expected to have more updates than Windows/Office/IE alone.

unethical technology

[Horar]

A computer consultant advocating Windows is like a doctor prescribing cigarettes. It creates a lot of extra work.

Re:unethical technology

[freedom_india]

A computer consultant who advocates Linux on Desktop is like doctor prescribing amputation without anasthesia.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[eosp]

The article here explains that you can either have a secured FTP repository or one grabbed by SSH.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[Compholio]

As I understand it, however, there's no way to protect that application against non-authenticated users. Can you have an APT repository that, say, requires a login and password?

Yes, there are other ways but a couple easy methods are in this article: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/513

Re:Apple Safari Jumbo Patch 50+ Vulnerabilities Fi

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody even know what "troll" means anymore? A troll is not somebody who says something you don't like.

The point of a troll is to get replies to a fake message. A troll is something like "Back when Bill Gates invented the internet blah blah". The point there is for know-it-alls to jump up and yell that it was not Bill Gates.

The grandparent was pointing out something he saw as hypocrisy. You might not agree, but that doesn't make him a troll. He might be a troll (if he pointed it out solely to see the replies), but I think it's a valid point, and I'm willing to bet he does too.

But that's the way people are, I suppose. Ever look at 1-star reviews on Amazon? Even good 1-star reviews ("I didn't like this, and here are the reasons why") tend to have, at best, a 50% "This was helpful" rate. People check off "unhelpful" because they disagree with the reviewer. I suppose it's no surprise that the OP here decided that someone who said something he disagrees with is a troll, but it sure would be nice for people to learn how to have some form of mature debate.

Re:Scary Good or Scary Bad?

[Bert64]

It benefits hackers immensely, if you have a new 0day exploit you start using it on exploit wednesday, or possibly a couple of days earlier on the basis they can't patch it that quick... then you are guaranteed at least a month before anyone will be patched against it.

Re:That's a lot of patches

[MrMr]

Yes, and yes.
Exactly indeed.
I wont bother with suppling a clue, as you've obviously never seen Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.

Re:Apple Safari Jumbo Patch 50+ Vulnerabilities Fi

[MrMr]

You are aware that these patches are for the beta release of a major upgrade?
Of course you are; You just like to use the word hypocrite a lot, to divert attention.

Re:Scary Good or Scary Bad?

[plague3106]

They have released patches out of band before for high risk exploits.