Silicon Shecky

Yep, that’s right, its that time of month where Microsoft’s servers get slammed. Its patch week.

This month some patches for holes that have Zero Day Exploits out for them already. Included in this is the Active X Video Hole, The Direct X Quicktime Hole, and the Open Type Font hole. The first two I had talked about when they came out, with the Direct X hole being the one that it looked like Microsoft had no serious plans of patching. Nice to be proven wrong.

There is no fix this month for Office Web components, which have recently come under attack. I expect this fix is being worked on and will be out soon. Considering the move to the cloud that people talk about, and that Office Web competes with Google Documents, they do need to secure it.

As always, I do recommend paying attention when you patch as one reader pointed out, you can choose not to install IE8, which still comes down as a critical patch, unless you download it and then stop the install of it, or tell the updater to hide the download of it. Yeah, its a pain, and unfortunately the everyday end user who we tell to make sure they install critical patches will still inadvertently install the sucker, we can at least try to educate them a little and not make the same mistake ourselves.

Well, it seems that another problem with Active X Video has gone Zero Day. Drive by (click by?) attacks are now exploiting the hole in the MS972890 advisory. This only affects IE, and only XP and 2003, so yes it is rather limited, but XP and 2003 are still very prevalent in the world.

The advisory does have a link on how to work around the vulnerability with a kill switch setting on the DLL file. Just shows another reason why I would not use IE if the web site does not require it.