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Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. today released six security bulletins that patched nine vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Outlook Express and SharePoint. But for the second time in two months, it yanked an update at the last minute.

Four of the six updates were rated critical, Microsoft's highest threat warning, while the remaining two were judged important, the next-lowest notch in the company's four-step scoring system.

MS07-057, the critical update to IE, should be patched first, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "It's an update for every version of IE and for every supported version of Windows, so its impact is across the board," he said. Of the four vulnerabilities patched by the update, three are related to address-bar-spoofing, the practice of disguising the URL shown by a browser to trick users into thinking they're visiting a safe or legitimate site. Two of those three were publicly disclosed in February and July, the first by Polish researcher Michal Zalewski and Danish researcher Jakob Balle of Secunia, the second by Zalewski alone.

Although Microsoft said today that it had no information to indicate that any of the IE vulnerabilities, the address-spoofing bugs included, had been exploited, Storms said he wasn't so sure. "The address bar spoofs would be perfect for the quintessential phishing campaign," he said. Exploits that leverage the vulnerability, he explained, would mask the URLs of bogus sites with fake addresses of legitimate sites and they could trick even users who pay attention to what's in a browser's address bar when they head to important pages, such as those where they log into online banking accounts.

"Nobody can keep a secret like this for eight months, so one has to assume that the bug [disclosed in February] has been in use for some time," said Storms.

For the most part, however, today's updates were yawners for Tom Cross, a researcher with IBM Internet Security Systems Inc.'s X-Force. "There's nothing here that is a huge, huge concern," said Cross. "They're just not that different from the things security professionals see every day. But that's good news, isn't it?"

Microsoft also patched critical vulnerabilities in the following software products:

• Outlook Express on Windows XP and 2000, and Windows Mail on Vista.


• Microsoft Word 2000 and XP for Windows PCs and Word 2004 on the Mac.


• All supported versions of Windows except Vista.

That third critical update, MS07-055, details a flaw in the Windows image viewer that parses Kodak formatted photos. The vulnerability resembles other image file bugs, such as the one in Windows Metafile that caused a ruckus in late 2005 and early 2006, but more important, it hints that attackers are still looking for such flaws. "The new vulnerability shows that there's an active research effort," said Storms, "primarily because of the vectors. You can host the image [on a malicious site] or send it [via an e-mail attachment."