It may be the silly season for some of us, but Microsoft is keeping IT admins busy with a record 14 patches this month.
Next week's whopping Patch Tuesday will fix 34 flaws across Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL, and Silverlight. Of the 14 patches, eight are rated critical and the rest are rated important.
"For those who keep track of such things, this will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions," security response communications manager Angela Gunn said in a post on the Microsoft security blog. "However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposure] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there's no new record there."
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2010/08/05/august-2010-bulletin-release-advance-notification.aspx
Of the critical patches, six apply to Windows, including the latest Windows 7, one fixes a flaw in Office, and the last is for Windows and Silverlight. Full details of the patches is available from Microsoft here.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-aug.mspx
Adobe
Adobe will release an out-of-band fix for flaws in Reader and Acrobat, one of which was unveiled at last week's Black Hat security conference.
That flaw, uncovered by security researcher Charlie Miller, makes use of an integer overflow error in TrueType fonts in PDFs to take over systems. The patch will arrive 16 August.
"At this time, Adobe is not aware of exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in this Security Advisory," the company noted in its security blog.
http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2010/08/pre-notification-out-of-band-security-updates-for-adobe-reader-and-acrobat.html
