Oracle January 2021 Critical Patch Update Includes Fixes for Five Critical WebLogic Flaws (CVE-2021-2109)

Oracle’s first Critical Patch Update of 2021 addressed 329 security updates across 25 product families, including five new critical flaws in Oracle WebLogic Server.

Background

On January 19, Oracle released the Critical Patch Update (CPU) for January 2021, its first quarterly release for the year. This quarterly update contains fixes for 202 CVEs in 329 security updates across 25 Oracle product families. Out of the 329 security updates published this quarter, over 42% were assigned a medium severity. Critical vulnerabilities only accounted for 14% of the security updates patched this quarter.

* Chart is accurate as of January 19, 2021

Analysis

This quarter’s update includes fixes for 47 critical CVEs. The Oracle Fusion Middleware category contained the highest number of patches at 60, representing just over 18% of the patches from this quarter. A full breakdown of the patches can be seen in the table below:

Two product families contained no exploitable vulnerabilities

This quarter and for the first time in recent memory, Oracle assigned no exploitable CVEs to two particular product families: Oracle Global Lifecycle Management and Oracle Secure Backup. This means that these two products did not contain any vulnerabilities that Oracle considered to be exploitable by an attacker. However, Oracle did note that this quarter’s updates include third party patches for five CVEs:

Five New Critical Vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic Server

As part of this quarter’s patch update, Oracle addressed five new vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic Server, a prominent application server solution within Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Product Family. Each quarter, we keep an eye out for newly disclosed flaws in WebLogic Server because of their favorability with attackers. This is supported in the findings from our 2020 Threat Landscape Retrospective Report, where we highlight four noteworthy vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic Server that were exploited in-the-wild.

The five vulnerabilities in WebLogic Server addressed this quarter includes:

All five vulnerabilities are considered “easily exploitable” according to Oracle, and successful exploitation would lead to a complete takeover of the WebLogic Server.

Fusion Middleware release contains patches for CVE-2020-14750

According to a note from Oracle in this quarter’s release, the Fusion Middleware product family contains patches for CVE-2020-14750, a patch bypass for CVE-2020-14882, which was initially patched in Oracle’s October 2020 CPU release. However, due to the discovery of the patch bypass and in-the-wild exploitation, Oracle released a fix as part of an out-of-band (OOB) patch. The January 2021 CPU includes this fix as part of the Fusion Middleware release to ensure organizations that did not apply the OOB patch receive these critical patches.

Proof of concept

At the time this blog post was published, a writeup on the exploitation of CVE-2021-2109, a WebLogic remote code execution vulnerability, was available. Details from the writeup include screenshots showing exploitation and technical details which could be used to create a working proof-of-concept.

Solution

Customers are advised to apply all relevant patches in this quarter’s CPU. Please refer to the January 2021 advisory for full details.

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify these vulnerabilities will appear here as they’re released.

Get more information

Join Tenable’s Security Response Team on the Tenable Community.

Learn more about Tenable, the first Cyber Exposure platform for holistic management of your modern attack surface.

Get a free 30-day trial of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management.