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Wakey, Wakey it's Patching Day. Again

MS issues roll-up security fix for IIS and much more

It's patching time again for sys admins with the release of a further set of enterprise software patches by Microsoft last night.

First up is a cumulative patch for Internet Information Service, Microsoft's Web server software.

This includes the functionality of all security patches released for IIS 4.0 since Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a, and all security patches released to date for IIS 5.0 since Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 and IIS 5.1. In addition the cumulative patch includes fixes for four newly discovered security vulnerabilities affecting IIS 4.0, 5.0 and 5.1.

These four problems include: a buffer overrun that results because IIS 5.0 does not correctly validate requests for certain types of web pages; a Cross-Site Scripting (CSS) vulnerability affecting IIS 4.0, 5.0 and 5.1 and a pair of denial of service vulnerabilities.

Fairly standard stuff then. Microsoft rates the cumulative patch as important. There's more information in Microsoft's advisory here.

Last night, Microsoft also issued a patch for a less serious flaw involving Windows Media Services that could result in denial of service. Microsoft rates the issue, which affects NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, as a moderate risk only.

Windows Media Services contain support for multicast streaming. Flaws in a logging component create a mechanism for crackers to crash vulnerable Windows servers running multicast streaming. But this service is not enabled by default, hence the relatively low risk.

Microsoft's advisory is here.

There's more.

Microsoft has carried out a spot of housekeeping on previously announced vulnerabilities.

A revised XP patch is designed to fix the performance hit that customers took when they applied the original (April) patch to fix a flaw in Windows Kernel Message Handling which left the door open to a denial of service risk. More info here.

Separately Microsoft last night extended a fix for a very serious flaw involving a Windows component (ntdll.dll) to XP and NT. Microsoft's previous patch, which only covered Win2K, was hastily released in March after an exploit based on this underlying problem was used to attack Windows 2000 Servers running IIS 5.0.

More info here. ®

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