SpiderLabs Blog

Microsoft Advance Notification for June 2014

Written by Robert Foggia | Jun 5, 2014 1:43:00 PM

Microsoft will be releasing the next security patch release on Tuesday, June 10th. This release will include 7 bulletins, which two bulletins are rated "Critical" affecting Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Lync. The bulletins rated "Important" include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Lync Server. It is likely a restart will be required to successfully install a majority of the patches so be prepared of it.

Overall, this appears to be another light Microsoft security release. However, if you use Internet Explorer as your default browser, you will want to install the security update ASAP. There are many nasty IE vulnerabilities included in this release.

One of these could potentially be a vulnerability in IE that was publicly disclosed but remains unpatched. On May 21st, 2014, TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative released an advisory regarding the CMarkup Use-After-Free Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8. It's very rare for a security vendor to release an advisory on a Microsoft product when no patch is available. TippingPoint publicly disclosed the advisory after Microsoft missed a 180-day deadline set by TippingPoint.

Fortunately, this vulnerability only affects Internet Explorer 8 and upgrading to the latest version will remediate this vulnerability. However, approximately a quarter of Internet Explorer installations are still on version 8, likely due to the fact that it is the most current version available for the retired Windows XP platform. This means that neither an upgrade nor a patch will be available to the majority of IE 8 users running Windows XP.

For a complete run-down of the June Microsoft security bulletins, please come back on June 10th. We hope to see you back soon!