Apparently it took a pair of independent researchers discovering and reporting a fairly nasty and very unpatched flaw in Java for Oracle to even consider breaking their normal patch cycle.  The Register reports on a flaw that can affect Windows and Linux based machines using the commands that Java Web Start will accept.  Not every machine will be vulnerable thankfully, an ActiveX control known as Java Deployment Toolkit and a Firefox plugin known as NPAPI are two ways this flaw can be exploited or shared.  In the mean time consider that one security researcher uninstalled Java a year ago and has still been surfing just fine.

“Researchers have discovered a flaw in the latest version of Oracle’s Java runtime environment that attackers can exploit to remotely execute malicious code on end user machines.

The bug in the Java Web Start component has been confirmed exploitable on all recent versions of Windows by Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher who prefers his employer not be named. Fellow researcher Ruben Santamarta of Spain-based security firm Wintercore, said a related flaw potentially affects Linux users as well.”

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