Oracle drops 1,449 security patches like it's the new normal

Summary

Security Oracle drops 1,449 security patches like it's the new normal Experts say the era of AI bug hunting is here, so defenders will simply have to adapt to busier workloads It's a bad day to be an Oracle admin: Big Red has just released 1,449 security patches ready to be applied.The patches were released as part of the company's quarterly security fixes, and the record number may partly reflect Oracle's internal push to harness AI for vulnerability detection, which it announced in April.Oracle also manages a huge product portfolio, and the patches span numerous products, so the total shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Instead, experts speaking to The Register unanimously agreed that any concerns over the number of patches should be reserved for the admins responsible for applying them, rather than for Oracle's code quality. Internal vs external CVEs A quick look at Oracle's acknowledgments shows that external researchers were credited with finding just 64 of the vulnerabilities addressed in this update, suggesting that much of the bug hunting was done internally, likely with the support of AI tools. "While a record 1,449 patches sounds alarming, it mostly reflects the massive scale of modern software ecosystems and the industry's shift toward aggressive, automated security scanning," said Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress."Frankly, the real story isn't the sheer volume of bugs, but rather the immense operational strain this puts on enterprise IT teams who must now race to separate the critical threats from the routine fixes without breaking business operations."Others, like Matei Badanoiu, lead security researcher at Pentest-Tools.com, say these bumper batches of security updates are likely to become the norm, owing mainly to AI-assisted bug hunting.Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday updates have ballooned in size in the last few months too, and not without warning.July's record 622 CVEs eclipsed June's 206, which at the time was ...