Microsoft plans to release up to 10 security updates to fix
vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel
tomorrow.
If all 10 are released, this month's Patch Tuesday will be the
largest single security update to Microsoft products since October
last year.
According to Microsoft's
advance notification, six updates will affect Windows and
require a restart. Two of them are rated "critical" and relate to
remote code execution.
One, rated "moderate", relates to information disclosure, and
three rated as "important" relate to elevation of privilege
vulnerabilities.
The other four planed updates are rated "critical" and will fix
problems in Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and Microsoft
Office.
The Internet Explorer update is critical on Windows Vista, XP
and 2000, and will be the first IE8 update since its release in
March.
The advance notification makes no mention of PowerPoint fixes
for the Mac operating system.
Microsoft last month issued a patch for a critical PowerPoint
vulnerability for all versions of Windows, but said Mac users would
have to wait.
The advance notification also makes no mention of a DirectX or
IIS vulnerabilities reported by Microsoft since the last
security update.
Business IT administrators will have to wait until the June
security update is released to see if these vulnerabilities will be
covered.