Microsoft April 09 Patch Tuesday: Eight Security Bulletins
Next week, on the 14th of April, Microsoft will issue an update for its Windows-based operating system, just as it has always done on the second Tuesday of the month (known as the Patch Tuesday program). With the April 09 Patch Tuesday the Redmond software developer will address a total of 8 security bulletins that affect the Windows OS, MS Office, Microsoft Forefront Edge Security and Internet Explorer.
“I wanted to let you know that we just posted our Advance Notification for next week’s bulletin release, scheduled for Tuesday, April 14, 2009 around 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. This should help you plan for your deployment process for next week and address these vulnerabilities to protect your computing environments. As part of this month’s security bulletin release process, we will issue eight security bulletins. These bulletins address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft ISA Server. Depending on the bulletin, a restart may be required. The updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. As we do each month, the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool will be updated,” explains Bill Sisk, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
The 8 security bulletins mentioned above can be divided according to the security rating given to them: 5 are critical, 2 are important, and 1 is moderate. Microsoft employs a 4-tier severity ranking: critical, important, moderate and low. The gravest of security issues are given a critical rating meaning that they can be exploited by people with malicious intent in the propagation of internet worms (like the recently updated Conficker worm, Conficker.E). All of the 5 critical bulletins included in this month’s Patch Tuesday allow for remote code execution on the targeted machine.
The Advance Notification that Microsoft issued can be viewed here. As always you are advised to stay safe, keep your OS and software up-to-date and not fall for any social engineering trick.
“I wanted to let you know that we just posted our Advance Notification for next week’s bulletin release, scheduled for Tuesday, April 14, 2009 around 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. This should help you plan for your deployment process for next week and address these vulnerabilities to protect your computing environments. As part of this month’s security bulletin release process, we will issue eight security bulletins. These bulletins address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft ISA Server. Depending on the bulletin, a restart may be required. The updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. As we do each month, the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool will be updated,” explains Bill Sisk, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
The 8 security bulletins mentioned above can be divided according to the security rating given to them: 5 are critical, 2 are important, and 1 is moderate. Microsoft employs a 4-tier severity ranking: critical, important, moderate and low. The gravest of security issues are given a critical rating meaning that they can be exploited by people with malicious intent in the propagation of internet worms (like the recently updated Conficker worm, Conficker.E). All of the 5 critical bulletins included in this month’s Patch Tuesday allow for remote code execution on the targeted machine.
The Advance Notification that Microsoft issued can be viewed here. As always you are advised to stay safe, keep your OS and software up-to-date and not fall for any social engineering trick.
