Patch Impact Assessment August 2019

Vulnerability Assessment

0

PUBLICLY DISCLOSED

0

EXPLOITED

0

ZERO-DAY

This is a huge month for Patch Tuesday as Microsoft attempts to address 78 unique vulnerabilities spanning Windows desktop and server platforms, Microsoft Office and core development tools. Without the pressure of a publicly reported vulnerability and no Zero-days to urgently address, we recommend a measure pace of testing before deployment for the Windows and Office updates, with a more rapid pace for the IE and development tools patches.

Windows

This is pretty massive update to the Windows platform with fifteen updates rated as critical and 55 rated as important by Microsoft. The two biggest issues relate to how Microsoft handles fonts (a recurring theme) and the worm-able vulnerability (CVE-2019-1222) in Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services). Not only does this month’s Patch Tuesday update attempt to address a large number vulnerabilities, it creates a large testing area for deployment engineers.

VULNERABILITIES

0
LOW

0
MODERATE

55
IMPORTANT

16
CRITICAL

PATCH NOW!

Browsers

Microsoft has attempted to address twelve vulnerabilities to both its web browsers (Edge and Internet Explorer) with nine rated as critical. Though we don’t have any vulnerabilities publicly reported or known to be exploited, two groups of issues relate to the Chakra scripting engine and how both browsers handle memory.

VULNERABILITIES

3
LOW

9
MODERATE

3
IMPORTANT

9
CRITICAL

PATCH NOW!

Office

This is an interesting month for Office updates. For August we see five patches rated as critical by Microsoft and the remaining nine updates are rated as important. Unusually, Microsoft has released an update to a trusted font issue for Office for Mac, and the venerable Office 2013 has an update to the aging Microsoft JET database engine.

VULNERABILITIES

0
LOW

0
MODERATE

9
IMPORTANT

5
CRITICAL

SCHEDULE

Dev Tools

Microsoft has attempted to address eight vulnerabilities to their development platform with seven rated as critical and the remainder rated as important. All the critical updates relate to the Chakra scripting engine (which also relate to the IE and Edge security issues. In addition to the Chakra issues and updates.

VULNERABILITIES

0
LOW

0
MODERATE

1
IMPORTANT

7
CRITICAL

SCHEDULE

Adobe Flash Player

Microsoft has not released any specific bulletins or advisories for Adobe products.

VULNERABILITIES

0
LOW

0
MODERATE

0
IMPORTANT

0
CRITICAL

WAIT

1 thought on “Patch Impact Assessment August 2019”

Robin Washburn
July 25, 2020 at 9:58 am

Is it common that when MSFT deploys patches it can bring ReAccess/Powerline down for a week? Our dev shop has reported 3 patches over the past 5 months that have brought our system down from 3 – 7 days each time.
It does not seem likely that MSFT would risk damage to their reputation by doing this, which is starting to happen with our company.
Any feedback would be appreciated.

Reply

Understanding the Threatscape Report

The Readiness “Threatscape” report summarizes your risk of not applying this month’s patches, using all publicly-available vulnerability data.

It’s important to note that it’s equally important to know the risk to your applications if you DO apply this month’s patches. This is of course is dependent on:

The current state (version and build) of each platform (Windows, Office, Browser, etc.).
Which applications are part of your portfolio.

Luckily, determining the risk of applying patches is easy (and fast and dynamic, thanks to our Dynamic Platform Assessment tool.

To understand what will happen when you apply this month’s patches, contact us and assess your first 25 applications for free.

For each major platform, the pie chart shows the breakdown of vulnerabilities rated critical, important, moderate and low. These match the tables below the graph.

The size of the pie represents the total number of vulnerabilities. The larger the pie, the more vulnerabilities present.

The position of the pie on the vertical axis represents the relative risk to your application portfolio. The higher the position, the higher the exploitability.