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Microsoft to issue record 14 patches

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 6 Aug 2010 at 08:19

It may be the silly season for some of us, but Microsoft is keeping IT admins busy with a record 14 patches this month.

Next week's whopping Patch Tuesday will fix 34 flaws across Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL, and Silverlight. Of the 14 patches, eight are rated critical and the rest are rated important.

"For those who keep track of such things, this will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions," security response communications manager Angela Gunn said in a post on the Microsoft security blog. "However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposure] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there's no new record there."

Of the critical patches, six apply to Windows, including the latest Windows 7, one fixes a flaw in Office, and the last is for Windows and Silverlight. Full details of the patches is available from Microsoft here.

Adobe

Adobe will release an out-of-band fix for flaws in Reader and Acrobat, one of which was unveiled at last week's Black Hat security conference.

That flaw, uncovered by security researcher Charlie Miller, makes use of an integer overflow error in TrueType fonts in PDFs to take over systems. The patch will arrive 16 August.

"At this time, Adobe is not aware of exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in this Security Advisory," the company noted in its security blog.

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User comments

Government PCs?

Given some of the comments on the earlier article re the Government and IE6, I presume the various IT departments will need till 2015 to check these fixes before installing them.

By milliganp on 6 Aug 2010

Too Many Organisations Still on IE6

Given that security is a very high priority in the public sector (at least where I work). It is more than ridiculous to see that we still use IE6, at a time when IE8 is available and there are much more secure browsers. The problem is compatability with legacy (old decrepid) software. Can't MS make a new browser which is backward compatible? That's the penalty for a company that did not adhere to standards - just created their own random ones.

By Manuel on 6 Aug 2010

bad programming..but not MS

surely the programmers of the web applications are themselves at fault for not adhering to browser standards so that their apps would work on any web browser not just IE6. Yes MS implemented their own ideas but they did not write the applications that are at the core of the problem.

By MDSmith71 on 6 Aug 2010

A record?

I thought we had a record with 30 odd patches earlier this year?

That said, using WSUS for updates a work, I lose count of the hundreds of updates we get through each and every month...

By big_D on 6 Aug 2010