Critical cryptographic Java security blunder patched – update now!


Oracle’s latest quarterly security updates just arrived.

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Unlike other software behemoths such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google, which produce official security updates once a month, thus following a schedule that is both regular and frequent, Oracle has historically and resolutely stuck to just four scheduled updates a year.

Even Apple, which notoriously ships all its security updates “when they are ready”, and therefore has no pre-announced calendar that allows you to predict and plan your non-urgent patches, rarely goes much more than a month these days without delivering patches. for known security holes.

So, as you can imagine, given Oracle’s huge product portfolio and its comparatively infrequent updates, when patches comethey typically come in large numbers.

This quarter’s updates are no exception, with 174 different products on the “patches available” list, from Engineered Systems Utilitiesthrough Oracle Blockchain Platform and Oracle Secure Backupall the way to Primavera Verifier.

Included in the security fixes listed for those 174 products are 401 distinct CVE-numbered bugs, of which well over half have CVE date tags of 2021 and earlier, with some going all the way back to 2017.

(For all that Oracle’s infrequent updates lead to huge patch lists, the company’s top-level Critical Patch Update Advisory is well-organized, and Oracle’s so-called “risk matrices” – the chief bugs for each product – are easy to find.)

In this article, however, we’re focusing on the bugs in Oracle’s Java productof which seven made the official risk matrix on account of being remotely exploitable without authentication – in other words, they’re bugs that could be exploited from outside your network by someone who hasn’t yet logged in, or who doesn’t have a login in the first place.

Note that remotely exploitable doesn’t mean all these bugs lead directly to remote code executionor RCE, where an outsider could literally implant and run any code they liked, merely that the bugs can be “reached” and abused by attackers who don’t yet have a formal foothold inside your network.