jginspace's Journal: Microsoft's Patch Tuesday to be Biggest for a While

After a few relatively quiet months on the patch front we're back to the good old days with a bumper issue of security bulletins coming up. Microsoft releases patches in a bundle on the second Tuesday of each month and according to the Advance Notification, we should expect 7 patches rated as 'critical' and 5 rated as 'important' next week.

Expect the regular cumulative patch for Internet Explorer 6, along with a slightly less regular one for IE7, along with a bundle of fixes for older versions of Office. It also appears someone has been poking around Microsoft's script offerings as vulnerabilities in VBScript and JScript have been found.

Internet Information Services (the web server bundled with Windows) is affected - versions 5 through to 7 (Win2000, XP, 2003, Vista). This could be an embarrassment for Microsoft as I think there were a few murmurings from Redmond about IIS being more secure than Apache. In what could be something of a headache for systems administrators, a denial of service vulnerability has been found in Active Directory

Overall Vista seems to be affected to just about the same degree as XP.