Microsoft is out with its June Patch Tuesday vulnerability haul, this time
issuing advisories on a range of technologies including Internet Explorer,
Bluetooth, Microsoft Speech, DirectX, Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
and Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) protocol.
Among the advisories labeled with the maximum severity of critical is
MS08-31, which details a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer browser. One of them is titled, “Request Header Cross-Domain
Information Disclosure Vulnerability” and it could potentially have allowed
an attacker to read a user’s data.
According to Microsoft’s advisory on the issue, “an attacker who
successfully exploited this vulnerability could read data from a Web page in
another domain in Internet Explorer.”
Microsoft noted that some social engineering would be required for
a user to be at risk from the vulnerability. The user would have to
physically visit a Web site that hosted the malicious code in order to be at
risk.
The second Internet Explorer vulnerability is titled “HTML Objects Memory
Corruption Vulnerability” and could lead to arbitrary code execution on the
user’s PC.
“When Internet Explorer displays a Web page that contains certain unexpected
method calls to HTML objects, it may corrupt memory in such a way that an
attacker could execute arbitrary code,” Microsoft stated in its advisory.
Also on the critical side are a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s
DirectX, which is core part of Windows multimedia handling infrastructure.
One the issues is a remote code execution vulnerability that could be
trigged by viewing a malicious MJPEG file. The second DirectX issue is also
a remote code execution risk, this time triggered by the way DirectX handles
Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) file types.
Microsoft’s advisory notes that, “Microsoft Synchronized Accessible Media
Interchange (SAMI) is a media format that allows a content developer to
include captions with digital media files.”
The Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) gets patched in the June update for
a privilege escalation vulnerability.
“An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists in the Windows Internet Name
Service (WINS) in the way that WINS does not sufficiently validate the data
structures within specially crafted WINS network packets,” Microsoft
explained in its advisory. “The vulnerability could allow a local attacker to
run code with elevated privileges. An attacker who successfully exploited
this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An
attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete date; or
create new accounts.”
“Only one engineer on our team had ever heard of it and he previously worked as a tester on the
Microsoft is also providing a patch in the June update for its Active
Directory system. According to the advisory on the issue, the vulnerability
is due to insufficient validation of specially crafted LDAP
requests. The issue could lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition or a
system restart.
Among the fixes on this Patch Tuesday includes for a protocol that many have
likely never heard of, let alone used.
There are two updates for security vulnerabilities in the Pragmatic General
Multicast (PGM) protocol which could lead to a DoS condition.
core network components team, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote on
the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog. “PGM is a multicast transport protocol that
guarantees reliable delivery from multiple sources to multiple receivers.”
