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Critical Fixes Arrive For Outlook Express, Word, IE
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-10-10
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Patch Tuesday may as well have arrived with a siren screaming, considering the fixes needed for three of Microsoft's most widely used products.
 | | Critical Fixes Arrive For Outlook Express, Word, IE |  |
The October edition of Microsoft's security bulletins sealed up remote code execution threats against a few of the company's products. Of particular interest were patches for Outlook Express and Windows Mail, the latter a feature in Windows Vista.
Vista has been widely touted by Microsoft as its most secure operating system. But Vista has had a few security concerns, with Windows Mail (Outlook Express as renamed for Vista) needing attention now.
A malformed NNTP response posed a remote code execution threat. Newsgroup content arrives via NNTP, and a maliciously craft web page could have exploited the vulnerability prior to this patch.
Internet Explorer required a cumulative rollup of three vulnerabilities, each posing a remote code execution threat. Problems in Word, and in the Kodak Image Viewer, also counted among Microsoft's critical fixes for October.
"Both the Kodak and Word vulnerabilities show increasing trend of client-side vulnerabilities that require user interaction," Amol Sarwate, research manager of the vulnerability research lab at Qualys, said of those threats.
"We see continuation of client-side attacks where client applications like Word, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and various image viewers are targeted," said Sarwate.
Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs, said the mechanism of delivering an attack through a single click on a malicious link continues to be a favored method among criminals.
"Users need to be more careful than ever when surfing the Internet," he said.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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