What's big and red and needs 270 security patches?

Oracle has revealed its quarterly Critical Patch Update Advisory for January 2017, which offers users a buffet of 270 fixes to apply.

Big Red says that “due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply CPU fixes as soon as possible.”

Where to start? Perhaps with the sole problem that rates a ten on the the Common Vulnerability Scoring Standard (CVSS) that Oracle uses to assess the scariness of bugs.

That bug impacts Oracle's Primavera project management product, which is susceptible to CVE-2017-3324, a remote code execution and/or denial of service bug present in Internet Explorer 9 and 11.

The Register counts three severity 9.8 bugs in Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control; a pair in the Fusion Middleware; and one each in Supply Chain Suite, PeopleSoft, Big Data Graph, JD Edwards and Oracle Communications Applications. Several refer to the same bug – CVE-2016-6303 – that NIST says is an “Integer overflow in the MDC2_Update function in crypto/mdc2/mdc2dgst.c in OpenSSL before 1.1.0 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds write and application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via unknown vectors.”

Java has 16 bugs, rated from 9.6 to 3.1. That's half the 32 issues deserving of repair in Oracle's E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware. Not far behind, with 27 patches apiece, you'll find MySQL's and Big Red's Flexcube banking code.

Plenty of the bugs aren't Oracle's fault: like most sensible software houses Big Red uses open source code and flaws in those projects account for quite a few of the 270 recommended patches. ®