Microsoft patches squash 13 IE vulns

On Tuesday, Microsoft released 12 bulletins for 57 vulnerabilities, including patches that addressed five critical flaws that could allow an attacker to remotely execute malicious code against users.

The critical patches were part of the company's scheduled Patch Tuesday security update and included fixes for flaws in Windows, Internet Explorer and Exchange Server.

In a Tuesday blog post, Ziv Mador, director of security research at Trustwave, said the most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution in IE versions 6 through 10. Microsoft resolved these issues –13 vulnerabilities – with one bulletin, MS13-009. 

“The [13 flaws] cover a myriad of issues mostly involving use-after-free vulnerabilities, which is a fancy way of describing how IE accesses an item in memory after it has been deleted,” the post read.

“An attacker could use these vulnerabilities by creating a special web page and then get people to visit that page either through an emailed link or compromised website.”

A critical vulnerability that could allow remote code execution if a user opened a malicious media fil sent through a variety of means, such as a Microsoft Office documents, was also patched with the update.

Seven of the updates were rated important by Microsoft, and fixed vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to carry out denial-of-service attacks and gain elevated privilege in users' systems. Those patches affected several products, including Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com