Oracle posted 41 patches on Tuesday as part of its regular quarterly patching cycle, with core database vulnerabilities being heavily represented.

The patch batch covers 17 updates for Oracle Database products, 11 updates for Oracle E-Business Suite, three updates for Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise products, along with six updates for Oracle Siebel SimBuilder products, among others. The load is less than previous security updates, but their impact on key vulnerable databases (in particular) is potentially serious, security watchers warn.

Slavik Markovich, CTO of database security software firm Sentrigo, explained: "It looks like the number of affected database components is larger this time than previous times, including patches in the core RDBMS engine and query optimiser... I can see advanced queuing in there. An endless source for SQL Injections and buffer overflows.

"Two of the vulnerabilities can be remotely exploited without authentication, which basically means that your database is a sitting duck unless you deploy this patch. The last we saw of those was, I believe, six months ago," he added.

Oracle's bulletin can be found here. A summary from security clearing house US CERT can be found here. ®

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