| Microsoft delivered its monthly batch of security updates on Feb. 13, delivering fixes for 20 individual problems in its products — six of which were dubbed as critical — including 11 issues in Windows, Office, IE and even its own anti-virus tools.
Among the security updates was a cumulative bulletin for the company’s Internet Explorer browser which seeks to address three issues all ranked as critical by the software maker.
Included in the IE bulletin were fixes for a pair of COM (component object model) instantiation memory corruption vulnerabilities, and a fix for an FTP server response parsing memory corruption issue. The issues are rated as critical in versions of the browser previous to its current IE 7 iteration in which they rank as only “important” or “low.”
In another cumulative bulletin, Microsoft issued patches for six individual problems in its Word products, five of which were rated as critical in the Office 2000 iteration of the product. Included in the update were fixes for a malformed strong vulnerability, malformed data structure flaw, malformed object drawing glitch, malformed function problem and a Word count issue, all of which received the critical designation in the Word 2000 version of the program.
An additional macro vulnerability and examples of the other five security problems present in later versions of Word were given the less severe ranking of important. However, all six of the Word vulnerabilities could lead to remote code execution by attackers if properly exploited, Microsoft stated.
In another Office-related bulletin, Microsoft distributed patches for two individual problems in the package, specifically detailing a malformed record memory corruption vulnerability in the product’s PowerPoint presentation application, along with a malformed record issue discovered in the Excel spread sheet program. Both issues were ranked as critical in the Microsoft Office 2000 version of the productivity suite, and only as important in later iterations of the platform. | 