Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This is, by far, the largest Patch Tuesday release since the start of the program. The vendor is releasing 16 bulletins covering a total of 49 vulnerabilities, including one of the zero-day vulnerabilities used by the Stuxnet threat.

Five of the issues are rated “Critical” and affect Internet Explorer, Embedded OpenType Fonts, .NET, and Media Player. The majority of the issues being addressed this month affect Excel (13 issues), Office (11 issues), and Internet Explorer (10 issues). The remaining issues affect Windows kernel-mode drivers, SChannel, OpenType Fonts, Shared Cluster Disks, Common Control Library, Local Procedure Call (LPC), Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Active Template Library, Sharepoint, and Groove.

 As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:
 
-     Install vendor patches as soon as...

Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This month’s release is the largest bulletin count since the start of the Patch Tuesday program, and a tie for the largest number of vulnerabilities addressed—the vendor is releasing 14 bulletins covering a total of 34 vulnerabilities.

Fourteen of the issues are rated “Critical” and affect Windows, SMB Server, Internet Explorer, Word, and Silverlight. Of particular note, the SMB Server issue can be exploited remotely, without authentication, to completely compromise an affected computer. The remaining issues, rated “Important” and “Moderate,” affect SMB Server, Windows, Word, and Excel.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

- Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
- Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
- Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources....

Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This is a fairly busy month—the vendor is releasing 10 bulletins covering a total of 34 vulnerabilities.

Six of the issues are rated “Critical” and affect Data Analyzer ActiveX, Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools, Internet Explorer, and Windows. All of the “Critical” issues are client-side and can result in remote code-execution in the context of the currently logged-in user if an attacker can trick an unsuspecting victim into performing some action. There are also a record number of issues affecting Excel, with 14 vulnerabilities being discovered in that program, 13 of which are remote code execution.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

- Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
- Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
- Avoid handling files from unknown or...