Microsoft issues mammoth security update

Microsoft Corp. today patched 28 vulnerabilities, nearly all of them marked "critical," in the biggest update since it switched to a regular monthly update schedule more than five years ago.

Of the 28 bugs quashed today, Microsoft ranked 23 of them critical, the top rating in its four-step scoring system. Of the five others, three were judged "important," the next step down, and two were pegged "moderate." The patches were issued in eight updates for Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office, SharePoint, Windows Media, and the company's most popular development tools, Visual Basic and Visual Studio.

Researchers agreed that one of the Windows updates should be tops on everyone's to-do list. "There are a few that will stick out for a lot of people," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "The GDI is one."

MS08-071, which contains two separate vulnerabilities, both critical, updates the Graphics Device Interface (GDI), the core graphics rendering component of Windows. GDI has been repeatedly patched by Microsoft, most recently in September.

"This looks very similar to MS08-021," said Storms, referring to an April update that patched two more GDI bugs. Like that earlier fix, as well as the one in September, hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities by duping users into opening or viewing malicious WMF (Windows Metafile) images.
"[MS08-071] is something similar to what we saw with WMF files once before this year, and once last year, too," said Amol Sarwate, manager of Qualys Inc.'s vulnerability lab. "It's in the core kernel, it's always there, it's in all versions of Windows and the attack vector is pretty high." Like Storms, Sarwate put the update at the top of his list.

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