Oracle’s Critical Patch Update (CPU) for April 2017 contains 299 fixes, the highest number compared to previous CPUs.
More than half of the vulnerabilities could be remotely exploitable without authentication. 40 of the issues were rated Critical, and 25 had a CVSS score of 10.
Oracle Financial Services Applications was the most affected product, receiving fixes for 47 vulnerabilities this month, with 19 of them rated critical with a CVSS score of 10. Aditionally, 25 of the 47 vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, Oracle’s advisory reveals.
The most important of the addressed issues are related to the Remote Code Execution flaw in Apache Struts 2 that was found last month to be exploited in the wild after someone published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. Cisco and VMWare products were impacted as well.
“Cybercrime has always been a lucrative business. Nowadays, hackers set their eyes on enterprises more than on individuals, as they understood that it is more profitable. Taking into account that Oracle’s products are installed in the largest enterprises, these applications can be the ultimate target. The good news is that the vendor drew its attention to this critical area before a serious data breach happens. The bad news is that Oracle admins will long work on installing numerous patches,” Alexander Polyakov, CTO at ERPScan, says.
Oracle addressed critical bugs in the Solaris component of Oracle Sun Systems Products Suite, MySQL Enterprise Monitor component of Oracle MySQL (Struts 2), Oracle FLEXCUBE Private Banking component of Oracle Financial Services Applications (Struts 2), Oracle Financial Services Asset Liability Management component of Oracle Financial Services Applications (Struts 2), and Oracle Financial Services Data Integration Hub component of Oracle Financial Services Applications (Struts 2).
Over the past several quarters, Oracle has been patching an increasingly higher number of vulnerabilities with each new CPU. With 276 patches, the July 2016 CPU was the first to include over 250 fixes, but the trend continued each quarter since, with 253 flaws addressed in October 2016, and 270 in January 2017.
The trend is expected to continue in the following quarters as well. However, as it usually happens with all software, this doesn’t mean the applications are becoming more vulnerable, but that the researcher community is getting better at finding security issues.
Related: Oracle Patches 270 Vulnerabilities Across Product Portfolio
Related: Oracle Critical Patch Update for October 2016 Fixes 253 Vulnerabilities