Alert goes out on Sun patch

Sun Microsystems issued an alert on Thursday for a patch for a software flaw discovered last September. The vulnerability, found within an open-source program for loading and rendering images in XPM format, has been deemed "highly critical" by security company Secunia. The flaw puts vulnerable machines at risk of a denial-of-service attack and other kinds of trouble.

Sun uses the program in its Solaris operating program and Java Desktop System. A handful of other software companies use the program too, but many, including Redhat, SuSE, Gentoo and Debian, issued patches much sooner, according to an advisory released Friday by the French Security Incident Response Team.