April '11 Patch Tuesday: 17 Bulletins, 64 Vulnerabilities

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 08 Apr 2011

This is the biggest Patch Tuesday this year. As you may remember, back in January, as part of the Patch Tuesday program, Microsoft rolled out 2 bulletins that fixed 3 vulnerabilities. Then in February it rolled out 12 bulletins that fixed 22 vulnerabilities. In March, the Redmond-based software giant rolled out only 3 bulletins that plugged 4 security holes.

This April, Microsoft will kick things into high gear and roll out more bulletins than it ever did in 2011. Come to think of it, this April Microsoft will roll out more bulletins than it ever did all 2010. The biggest Patch Tuesday in 2010 was the October one, when 16 bulletins were rolled out, fixing 49 vulnerabilities. At the time, the October 2010 Patch Tuesday was a record breaking Patch Tuesday.

That record has been broken by the April 2011 Patch Tuesday. On the 12th of April Microsoft will roll out 17 security bulletins that are meant to address a grand total of 64 vulnerabilities. An advance notification for the April '11 Patch Tuesday has been posted online here. It says that out of the 17 security bulletins, 9 are rated as 'critical' and 8 are rated as 'important'.

As a little reminder, the 'critical' rating refers to vulnerabilities whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action. The 'important' rating refers to vulnerabilities whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users’ data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.

Pete Voss, Senior Response Communications Manager with Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, explained that the 64 vulnerabilities that will be addressed on Tuesday plague the Windows operating system, the Office productivity suite, the Internet Explorer web browser, Visual Studio, .NET Framework and GDI+.

The 17 bulletins mentioned above will be released by Microsoft on the 12th of April at about 10 a.m. PDT.


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