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Oracle October 2021 Critical Patch Update Addresses 231 CVEs
Oracle addresses 231 CVEs in its final quarterly update of 2021 with 419 patches, including 36 critical updates.
Background
On October 19, Oracle released its Critical Patch Update (CPU) for October 2021, the fourth and final quarterly update of the year. This CPU contains fixes for 231 CVEs in 419 security updates across 28 Oracle product families. Out of the 419 security updates published this quarter, 8.6% of patches were assigned a critical severity. Medium severity patches accounted for the bulk of security patches at 47.3%, followed by high severity patches at 40.6%.
This quarter’s update includes 36 critical patches across 19 CVEs.
| Severity | Issues Patched | CVEs |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 36 | 19 |
| High | 170 | 78 |
| Medium | 198 | 120 |
| Low | 15 | 14 |
| Total | 419 | 231 |
Analysis
This quarter, the Oracle Communications product family contained the highest number of patches at 71, accounting for 17% of the total patches, followed by Oracle MySQL at 66 patches, which accounted for 15.8% of the total patches.
In addition to the 28 product families that received security patches this quarter, Oracle did not include security patches for four product families:
- Oracle Global Lifecycle Management
- Oracle NoSQL Database
- Oracle Spatial Studio
- Oracle SQL Developer
While these four product families did not receive security patches, Oracle notes that there are third-party patches included as part of its CPU release:
| Product Family | Component | Third-Party Library | CVE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global Lifecycle Management | Patch Installer | Apache Commons Compress | CVE-2021-36090 |
| Global Lifecycle Management | Patch Installer | Apache Commons Compress | CVE-2021-35515 |
| Global Lifecycle Management | Patch Installer | Apache Commons Compress | CVE-2021-35516 |
| Global Lifecycle Management | Patch Installer | Apache Commons Compress | CVE-2021-35517 |
| Global Lifecycle Management | Patch Installer | jackson-databind | CVE-2020-25649 |
| NoSQL Database | Administration | Go | CVE-2021-34558 |
| NoSQL Database | Administration | Netty | CVE-2021-21409 |
| Spatial Studio | Install | Apache Commons IO | CVE-2021-29425 |
| Spatial Studio | Install | Apache Commons BeanUtils | CVE-2019-10086 |
| SQL Developer | Infrastructure | Apache PDFBox | CVE-2021-27807 |
A full breakdown of the patches for this quarter can be seen in the following table, which also includes a count of vulnerabilities that can be exploited over a network without authentication.
| Oracle Product Family | Number of Patches | Remote Exploit without Auth |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle Communications | 71 | 35 |
| Oracle MySQL | 66 | 10 |
| Oracle Financial Services Applications | 44 | 22 |
| Oracle Fusion Middleware | 38 | 23 |
| Oracle Retail Applications | 26 | 15 |
| Oracle Communications Applications | 19 | 17 |
| Oracle E-Business Suite | 18 | 3 |
| Oracle PeopleSoft | 17 | 1 |
| Oracle Insurance Applications | 16 | 8 |
| Oracle Java SE | 15 | 8 |
| Oracle Construction and Engineering | 12 | 9 |
| Oracle JD Edwards | 11 | 5 |
| Oracle Database Server | 9 | 8 |
| Oracle Enterprise Manager | 8 | 8 |
| Oracle Virtualization | 8 | 8 |
| Oracle Health Sciences Applications | 6 | 0 |
| Oracle Hyperion | 6 | 4 |
| Oracle Siebel CRM | 6 | 5 |
| Oracle Essbase | 5 | 4 |
| Oracle Supply Chain | 5 | 1 |
| Oracle Systems | 5 | 5 |
| Oracle Commerce | 2 | 3 |
| Oracle GoldenGate | 1 | 2 |
| Oracle Graph Server and Client | 1 | 0 |
| Oracle REST Data Services | 1 | 1 |
| Oracle Secure Backup | 1 | 1 |
| Oracle Hospitality Applications | 1 | 1 |
| Oracle Utilities Applications | 1 | 0 |
| Oracle Global Lifecycle Management | 0 | 0 |
| Oracle NoSQL Database | 0 | 0 |
| Oracle Spatial Studio | 0 | 0 |
| Oracle SQL Developer | 0 | 0 |
Highest severity flaw in Oracle Essbase
The highest rated vulnerability in this quarter’s Oracle CPU was CVE-2021-35652, a vulnerability in Oracle Essbase, a business analytics solution. The flaw resides in Essbase Administration Services and requires no privileges to exploit. It was disclosed, along with four other vulnerabilities in this CPU by Guillaume Jacques, Paul Barbé and Théo Louis-Tisserand of synacktiv.
Solution
Customers are advised to apply all relevant patches in this quarter’s CPU. Please refer to the October 2021 advisory for full details.
Identifying affected systems
A list of Tenable plugins to identify these vulnerabilities will appear here as they’re released.
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