Apple and Cisco delivered patches on Wednesday to eliminate a peck of flaws, with Apple releasing a patch to close more than 50 vulnerabilities in Java for Mac OS X and Cisco issuing a dozen security advisories for its products.

Consumer technology maker Apple released an update for the latest version of the Mac OS X to fix 51 vulnerabilities in Sun Microsystem's Java runtime engine, a few documented at least as early as March 2008. Some of the security flaws could allow an attacker to execute malicious programs using remote exploits, while others allow privilege escalation on the affected system, according to Apple's advisory. Apple released a smaller update for a subset of the issues for its earlier Mac OS X 10.4.

Cisco released a dozen security advisories to fix serious security issues in its networking hardware. Among the issues fixed by the networking giant are a vulnerability in the processing of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) packets, a flaw in handling Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) requests, and information leakage from some virtual private network (VPN) connections, according to a list of the fixes published on Wednesday.

This is the third major patch for Apple this month. The company released fixes for security problems in QuickTime and iTunes earlier this month, and a patch for almost three dozen flaws in Mac OS X components last week.

If you have tips or insights on this topic, please contact SecurityFocus.