How much does Oracle love you? Thiiiis much: Latest patch bundle has 402 fixes

October 21, 2020 TH Author

Oracle has released its final quarterly batch of patches for the year for security flaws in its products. The total this time? 402 fixes, the bulk of which are rated critical in terms of severity.

In all, there are 230 CVE-listed bugs fixed across 27 Oracle products, according to Tenable, which noted Big Red’s record is still July 2020 with more than 440 patches.

“Oracle continues to periodically receive reports of attempts to maliciously exploit vulnerabilities for which Oracle has already released security patches,” the database giant warned in its advisory accompanying its software patches.

“In some instances, it has been reported that attackers have been successful because targeted customers had failed to apply available Oracle patches. Oracle therefore strongly recommends that customers remain on actively-supported versions and apply Critical Patch Update security patches without delay.”

“Due to the threat posed by a successful attack,” it continued, “Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply Critical Patch Update security patches as soon as possible “Until you apply the Critical Patch Update patches, it may be possible to reduce the risk of successful attack by blocking network protocols required by an attack.”

So, you know, test, patch, deploy, as soon as you can before someone exploits one of these vulnerabilities in your infrastructure. Products updated this quarter include:

Oracle Enterprise Manager;
Big Data Spatial and Graph;
a number of Hyperion-branded Fusion Middleware products;
MySQL Cluster, Enterprise Monitor, Server and Workbench;
various financial services and supply chain-focused applications;
Oracle Communications products
Oracle Financial Services products and apps
Healthcare hospitality and retail products
Oracle Policy Automation products
Oracle VM VirtualBox
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Kit
Webcenter and Weblogic

Quite a few of the vulns are exploitable without requiring any special privileges, such as those in Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database (CVE-2018-11058, CVE-2017-5645, CVE-2019-1010239 and CVE-2019-0201). Similarly, 41 of the patched vulns in Oracle Communications “may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e. may be exploited over a network without requiring user credentials,” to use Big Red’s own words.

The full list of updates, part of Oracle’s routine critical quarterly patch run, can be read on its website. More detailed information is available for those with an Oracle login to access fully detailed patch notes.

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at antivirus vendor Eset, told The Register: “All critical patch updates are important and require the earliest, convenient patching but worryingly, even infosec folk can be procrastinators and put off critical updates when they are released due to the inconvenience often caused. Amplified with more remote working than ever, such updates can cause more of a headache than before for their admins.”

He added: “But of course as always, it is vital to patch as soon as possible to avoid being exploited by these now known vulnerabilities.”

Back in January Oracle patched a similar number of flaws, including a priv-escalation issue in Solaris 10 Common Desktop, as we reported at the time.

Big Red only does four scheduled security updates each year, on the Tuesday closest to the 17th of January, April, July and October. Maybe it should shift to a more frequent vulnerability disclosure schedule, to avoid dumping so many critical patches on hard working admins all at once. ®