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Patch Tuesday Security Briefing
 With 16 bulletins issued from Microsoft today, this month isn‘t as big as April (thankfully), but it is still sizable and certainly disruptive, as it affects applications across the board.
With 9 critical bulletins and the vast majority directly requiring a reboot, this marks the beginning of a long summer for IT professionals with no room for slowing down. Four of the critical and a few of the important patches affect Windows; 7 critical and 3 important patches affect Internet Explorer. And with this Patch Tuesday, we are seeing Internet Explorer 9 affected for the first time. However, IE9 isn’t as much of a concern as IE6, which often seems to be the lowest common denominator in security breaches. It is absolutely imperative that people download a newer version of IE in order to take advantage of the more secure codebase.
The SMB issue is another important patch - the server is just a DoS vector but if you are running the client, it is a high priority. We also have a number of kernel updates that impact the Windows product family; they are a priority as well and include additional protections for SMB at the kernel level.
There is also a patch for MHTML issues to mitigate cross-site scripting issues and as this is a popular threat vector, it is also a priority. The Office Excel patch is also a hot patch, as Excel has historically been a delivery mechanism for spear phishing.
One of the more interesting patches is for Hyper V, as it is one of the first released for the product - it covers a DoS issue. MORE »
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