Seven Critical Fixes Expected on Tuesday
IT Pros and system administrators will be mighty busy this month as Microsoft announced on Thursday that it plans to release 12 patches for its monthly security bulletin rollout. Seven of these patches will be critical and five will be deemed important when released on Patch Tuesday next week, Redmond says.
The critical patches will touch on a cornucopia of programs, including various Windows OS versions and applications such as Internet Explorer, Access, Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office. The updates to Office will include individual patches for PowerPoint and Excel, for which Microsoft has issued several hotfixes and advisories in the last year.
Of the five important patches, four will affect Windows and one will plug vulnerabilities in Office. There will be fixes for Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Messenger. The remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability is being addressed by all but three of the fixes contained in this month's patch. The remaining three fixes address what Redmond is calling "information disclosure" vulnerabilities.
