Patches for 26 Windows, Office vulnerabilities coming next Tuesday

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 February 2010 07:25

Business IT - Security

Microsoft is planning to dish up heapin' helpin' of security bulletins next week. So if you do the regression testing for an organisation, consider completing your Valentine's Day preparations early in the week.

Microsoft has warned that it will be releasing 13 security bulletins on February's Patch Tuesday (February 9, US time).

A total of 26 vulnerabilities will be patched - but not the SMB issue that was publicly disclosed back in November. Affecting Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, that flaw allows a malicious SMB server to cause a connected system to hang by sending it a malformed SMB response packet.

Nor - understandably - will there be a fix for the information disclosure vulnerability publicly disclosed earlier this week in Internet Explorer when not running in Protected Mode.

The problem mainly affects Windows XP and 2000, as Protected Mode is the default for Internet Explorer on Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008.

So what updates are planned for release next week? As always, Microsoft remains cagey about the exact content of bulletins until they are released. What we do know is that 13 bulletins are planned, covering 26 vulnerabilities.

Please read on for information about how various versions of Windows are affected.