Microsoft to Patch Seven Flaws in July’s Patch Tuesday

Microsoft has posted its advanced notification for Tuesday’s monthly round of patches, which will include six critical patches and one rated as important. Included in the roundup is a fix for an issue revealed in May by researcher Tavis Ormandy.

The patch that will get the most news attention is likely to be CVE-2013-3660, which is a memory management problem in win32k.sys – the Windows Kernel. Code to exploit this flaw was added to Metasploit last month.

In May, when it was fully disclosed to the public, Ormandy called it a “pretty obvious bug,” and Microsoft (while taking more than a month to patch it), has listed it as critical. 

“As far as I can tell, this code is pre-NT (20+ years) old, so remember to thank the SDL for solving security and reminding us that old code doesn’t need to be reviewed,” Ormandy said at the time.

As for the other five critical patches, Microsoft is addressing flaws in .NET, Silverlight, Office, Lync, Visual Studio, and the core OS itself. The patch ranked important, listed as an Elevation of Privilege problem, will impact Windows 7 and Server 2008 deployments of Windows Defender.

For those in the trenches, Qualys’ CTO, Wolfgang Kandek, noted that in addition to the Kernel patch, the fixes for Internet Explorer and Office should be a priority.

“Bulletin 4 is for Internet Explorer and affects all versions from IE6 on Windows XP to IE10 on Windows 8 and RT. This will probably the most important Bulletin to implement, together with Bulletin 3 which addresses vulnerabilities capable of giving RCE to an attacker in Windows, Office and Lync,” he noted in a blog post.

“All in all, a normally sized Patch Tuesday, but with a large number of critical issues…for time being it seems as if this Patch Tuesday will generate work for both Desktop and Server admins.”

Microsoft’s advance notification, which will change to the full summary next week, can be seen here.