Patch Tuesday Analysis for April 2008

As usual most of the patches this month address workstation vulnerabilities. If you are responsible for workstation security be sure to review all of these patches and plan to deploy them. Thankfully you have time for testing and planning since none of this month’s vulnerabilities are public or being exploited at this time.

2 of the vulnerabilities are possibly an issue for servers, too:

• The DNS Client (945553) vulnerability could be a real issue for workstations but should only be a problem for internal servers from bad guys that can deploy bogus DNS servers on your network.
• The Windows Kernel vulnerability (941693) is an issue for Terminal Servers and is also an issue on workstations where the end-user is already an admin.

Remember, on servers, you can avoid most vulnerabilities and the resulting patches by refraining from any type of end-user activities while logged on locally or via Remote Desktop. That means no web browsing, email, working with Office documents or other files – including images – downloaded from the Internet.

Chart of this month’s patches follows.
 

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