Oracle has issued an alert (PDF) detailing high risk security holes affecting all SSL products in the Oracle9i Application Server, the Oracle9i and Oracle8i Database Servers, and Oracle HTTP server. "Any client that is able to access the server may exploit the vulnerabilities," the company said in its alert.

The patches address security issues in OpenSSL that were outlined on our site last month, and originally published by NISCC on Sept. 30. Fixes for these problems are available in the latest versions of OpenSSL (0.9.6k and 0.9.7c).

OpenSSL is an open source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a general purpose cryptography library.

Topically, the host involved in todays fraud attack on National Westminster was, according to the published Apache module line running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL.