Oracle spoils your day with NEARLY 150 patches

Systems administrators who decided it would be a quiet week were wrong: Oracle has flicked out more than a hundred security patches, and when you're finished, it'll be time to round up any Blackberry useBs in the company and apply some patches for them.

Let's start with Oracle, which among other things is taking another stab at securing Java, fixing 36 vulnerabilities of which 34 are “remotely exploitable without authentication”. All but one are client-side vulnerabilities, and ten of them are rated by Oracle at 9.3 or 10 on its vuln scale.

Once they've finished dealing with the Java fixes, weary sysadmins can then work on five database server patches (only one remote-without-authentication); 22 Fusion Middleware patches (19 remotely exploitable); two for Hyperion; four for the E-Business Suite (one remotely exploitable); 16 for the Supply Chain suite (six remotely exploitable); 17 for PeopleSoft (ten remotely exploitable); two for Siebel (one remotely exploitable); one each for iLearning and Financial Services (both remotely exploitable).

There are also eleven Solaris operating system patches, nine virtualisation patches, and 18 MySQL server patches.

The wearying list, along with links to patches, is here.

To complete this unexpectedly busy patch Thursday, BlackBerry Q10, Z10 and PlayBook owners need to get busy patching their devices, after the struggling smartphone maker issued a fix for a year-old Adobe Flash vulnerability.

The original vulnerability reports, here, here, here and here, allowed attackers to craft Flash content that would let them execute code in the browser.

“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could potentially result in an attacker executing code in the context of the application that opens the specially crafted Flash content (typically the web browser). Failed exploitation of this issue might result in abnormal or unexpected termination of the application,” the BlackBerry advisory says.

“If the requirements are met for exploitation, an attacker could potentially execute code with the rights of the application that opens the specially crafted malicious Flash content,” (for example, the browser) the advisory states, adding that its sandboxing should prevent an attacker from getting beyond the browser's context.

This is a separate fix to last September's set of patches, which addressed Flash vulnerabilities among others. ®