Emergency Microsoft security bulletins coming this week

Stephen Withers
Monday, 27 July 2009 06:45

Business IT - Security

Microsoft is preparing an out-of-cycle security update for release tomorrow, July 28 (US time).

Microsoft's usual practice is to release security bulletins on the second Tuesday of the month. But from time to time a matter emerges that is too urgent to wait, and Microsoft pushes out the fix ahead of schedule.

And so it is this week. Microsoft has warned that it is about to release a critical bulletin for Internet Explorer and a moderate bulletin for Visual Studio. In both cases, the underlying vulnerabilities allow remote code execution.

The IE update is partially related to the Visual Studio issue, but also contains other, more serious fixes.

The list of affected software includes Internet Explorer 5.01, 6, 7 and 8; Visual Studio .NET 2003, 2005 and 2008; and the Visual C++ 2005 and 2008 redistributable packages.