Microsoft on Tuesday will serve up a flood of security bulletins in its monthly patch update. The patches will address 34 individual vulnerabilities, including eight critical and six important fixes, in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and SQL.
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On the Windows front, the fixes target Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and Windows Server 2008 release 2. Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 will also be patched.
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In terms of productivity software, Office XP Service Pack 3, Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac, Office Word Viewer, Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, 2007 File Formats Service Pack 2, and Microsoft Works 9 will see fixes. Finally, bugs in Silverlight 2 and 3 will be eradicated with the August patch.
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This will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month. We have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions, said Angela Gunn, security response communications manager at Microsoft. However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposures] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there’s no new record there.
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subhead
The Symantec Factor
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With more than half of Tuesday’s patches rated critical, requiring a restart and impacting most of the Microsoft platform, Paul Henry, a security analyst for Lumension, said IT admins will have to put off any last-ditch effort to enjoy the end of summer.
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While it is concerning to deal with the high volume of critical patches, even more concerning is the recent Stuxnet revelation by Symantec, saying that they’ve identified an early version of the worm that was created in June 2009, and that the malicious software was then made much more sophisticated in the early part of 2010, Henry said.
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Symantec also said its critical infrastructure and enterprise networks were exposed to the LNK vulnerability and were targeted for more than a year….