March '11 Patch Tuesday: 3 Bulletins, 4 Vulnerabilities

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 04 Mar 2011

UPDATE March 9th
Details on the 3 security bulletins Microsoft released are available
here .

Microsoft announced that on Tuesday, the 8th of March, as part of the Patch Tuesday program (fixes and patches are released every second Tuesday of the month), it will roll out a 3 security bulletins. The security bulletins in question are meant to address 4 vulnerabilities that plague the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office productivity suite.
Angela Gunn announced via the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) that out of the 3 security bulletins that will be released on Tuesday, 2 are rated 'important' and 1 is rated 'critical'.

In case you don’t already know this, 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.

An advance notification for the March 2011 Patch Tuesday has been posted online here. You can check it out for additional information on this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Putting the spotlight on previous months’ Patch Tuesdays, Microsoft kicked off 2011 by releasing only 2 bulletins in January. One bulletin carried the 'important' rating, the other carried the 'critical' rating. The 2 bulletins released as part of the January 2011 Patch Tuesday fixed 3 vulnerabilities that plagued the Windows operating system.

Microsoft kicked things in high gear in February 2011, when it released 12 bulletins; these bulletins addressed a grand total of 22 vulnerabilities that plagued the Windows operating system, the Internet Explorer web browser, the Office productivity suite, the Visual Studio integrated development environment, and IIS (Internet Information Services). Out of the 12 bulletins Microsoft rolled out as part of the February 2011 Patch Tuesday, 3 were rated as 'critical' while the remaining 9 were rated as 'important'.


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