Oracle confirms existence of another critical Java flaw

When Oracle finally patched the CVE-2012-4681 Java 0-day that was being actively exploited in the wild, Polish firm Security Explorations immediately piped up to say they found a similar one that could very soon put Java users in danger again.

“The out-of-band patch released by Oracle yesterday, among other things fixed the exploitation vector with the use of SunToolkit class, the one we used in our proof of concept codes. This made many of them not working…Till today,” the company’s CEO Adam Gowdiak shared at the time.

“When combined with some of the Apr 2012 issues, the new issue reported to Oracle today allows to achieve a complete JVM sandbox bypass in the environment of latest Java SE 7 Update 7.”

The existence of this flaw has been confirmed by Oracle, says Gowdiak, and will be addressed in the upcoming Java Critical Patch Update, which is scheduled for October 16.

Even though there is no mention of active in the wild attacks exploiting the flaw, users could preempt attackers by either to disabling or removing Java and/or Java applets until the patch is pushed out.