August 9th, 2007

On deck: Critical Windows, Office, IE patches

Posted by Ryan Naraine @ 11:35 am

Categories: Botnets, Browsers, Data theft, Digital rights management, Exploit code, Hackers, Metasploit, Microsoft, Passwords, Patch Watch, Piracy, Responsible disclosure, Spyware and Adware, Viruses and Worms, Vulnerability research, Windows Vista, Zero-day attacks

Tags: Microsoft Office, Patch Management, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Severity, Microsoft Corp., Bulletin, Ryan Naraine

Microsoft plans to ship nine security bulletins next Tuesday with patches for a wide range of “critical” vulnerabilities affecting the Windows operating system, the Microsoft Office productivity suite and the widely deployed Internet Explorer browser.

In an advance notice alert issued today, the software maker said six of the nine bulletins will carry the highest severity rating while the remaining three will be rated “important.”

The bare bones details, via the MSRC, points to:

• Six bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows with a maximum severity rating of critical. These updates will require a restart and will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool.
• One bulletin affecting Microsoft Office with a maximum severity rating of critical. These updates will not require a restart and will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.
• One bulletin affecting Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows with a maximum severity rating of critical. This update will require a restart and will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.
• One bulletin affecting Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server with a maximums everity rating of important. This update will require a restart and will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool.

The Windows Media Player and the Windows Vista operating system are also affected by this batch of updates.