Apple on Wednesday delivered a patch to eliminate more than 50 vulnerabilities in Java for Mac OS X with Cisco also issueing 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 had earlier released a smaller update for a subset of the issues for its Mac OS X 10.4.

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.

Meanwhile, Cisco also issued a dozen security advisories for its products to fix serious security issues in its networking hardware.

Among the issues fixed by the networking giant is 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, a list of the fixes published on Wednesday said.