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:
| Oracle Product Family | Number of Patches | Remote Exploit without Auth |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle Fusion Middleware | 60 | 47 |
| Oracle Financial Services Applications | 50 | 41 |
| Oracle MySQL | 43 | 5 |
| Oracle Retail Applications | 32 | 20 |
| Oracle E-Business Suite | 31 | 29 |
| Oracle Virtualization | 17 | 0 |
| Oracle Communications | 12 | 7 |
| Oracle Supply Chain | 11 | 11 |
| Oracle Database Server | 8 | 1 |
| Oracle Communications Applications | 8 | 6 |
| Oracle Enterprise Manager | 8 | 8 |
| Oracle PeopleSoft | 8 | 6 |
| Oracle Construction and Engineering | 7 | 5 |
| Oracle Hyperion | 7 | 5 |
| Oracle Health Sciences Applications | 5 | 3 |
| Oracle JD Edwards | 5 | 5 |
| Oracle Siebel CRM | 4 | 1 |
| Oracle Systems | 4 | 3 |
| Oracle Insurance Applications | 3 | 1 |
| Oracle Food and Beverage Applications | 2 | 1 |
| Oracle GraalVM | 2 | 2 |
| Oracle Global Lifecycle Management | 1 | 0 |
| Oracle Secure Backup | 1 | 0 |
| Oracle Java SE | 1 | 1 |
| Oracle Utilities Applications | 1 | 1 |
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:
| CVE | Oracle Product Family | Third Party Software |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2019-12402 | Oracle Global Lifecycle Management | Apache Commons Compress |
| CVE-2020-7064 | Oracle Secure Backup | PHP |
| CVE-2020-1198 | Oracle Secure Backup | Apache HTTP Server |
| CVE-2020-11993 | Oracle Secure Backup | Apache HTTP Server |
| CVE-2020-9490 | Oracle Secure Backup | Apache HTTP Server |
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:
| CVE | Component | CVSSv3 |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2021-1994 | Web Services (HTTP) | 9.8 |
| CVE-2021-2047 | Core Components (IIOP, T3) | 9.8 |
| CVE-2021-2064 | Core Components (IIOP, T3) | 9.8 |
| CVE-2021-2108 | Core Components (IIOP, T3) | 9.8 |
| CVE-2021-2075 | Samples (IIOP, T3) | 9.8 |
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
- Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory - January 2021
- Oracle January 2021 Critical Patch Update Risk Matrices
- Oracle Advisory to CVE Map
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.