April 15th, 2009
Oracle drops mega critical patch bundle
Oracle has released the first Critical Patch Update for 2009 to provide fixes for at least address 43 vulnerabilities across several database server products.
The mega update, released on the same day Microsoft released its own security patches, plugs at least 16 holes in the company’s flagship Oracle Database server. Two of the database vulnerabilities (Cluster Services, TNS Listener) are remote exploitable without authentication.
Alexander Kornbrust at Red Database Security provides this useful snapshot:
The highest CVSS base score is 9.0 is a bug in the resource manager (Oracle 9.2 only) and requires create session privileges only.
This time Oracle has fixed 3 of our vulnerabilities (2 times SQL Injection in Oracle Advanced Queuing, Apex). The description from Oracle concerning the APEX problem is not correct. To access the APEX password hashes there is no need for an APEX development user. A simple database user with create session is sufficient.
12 researchers are mentioned in this oracle advisory (2 from Red-Database Security (Franz Hüll and Alexander Kornbrust). The usual suspects (Esteban, Joxean and David) are part of the reporters again.
The most critical Oracle security bug (CVE-2009-0979) affects the Resource Manager in Oracle 9.2.
The full batch in this CPU:
- 16 updates for Oracle Database Server
- 12 updates for Oracle Application Server
- 3 updates for Oracle Applications
- 4 updates for Oracle PeopleSoft and JDEdwards Suite
- 8 updates for BEA Products Suite
Also see this recap from Oracle’s Eric Maurice.
* Image from space.Boy’s Flickr photostream (Creative Commons 2.0)
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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