Patch Tuesday aligns for Microsoft and Adobe

Stephen Withers
Friday, 10 June 2011 09:05

Business IT - Security

The stars align for a double witching hour this month: both Microsoft and Adobe will be releasing security updates next Tuesday.

June 14 is Flag Day in the US. It's also this month's Patch Tuesday, and as happens on a quarterly basis, Adobe will be releasing security updates at the same time as Microsoft.

Microsoft is foreshadowing a busy time for system admins that need to carry out pre-deployment testing, with 16 bulletins covering 34 vulnerabilities in a range of products. Nine of them are regarded as critical, and the remainder are categorised important.

The critical updates will apply to Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, .NET Framework, and the Forefront Threat Management Gateway. The important bulletins are for Windows, Office (Windows and Mac), SQL Server, and VIsual Studio.

All of the critical Windows bulletins affect all supported versions of the operating system, though one is only regarded as important on Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Conversely, some of the updates are only relevant to newer Windows versions.

Angela Gunn of Microsoft's trustworthy computing team noted that the bulletin for Internet Explorer starts to address the issue of 'cookiejacking' (stealing cookies from a computer and using them to access the user's website accounts) by blocking a known vector to the cookie folder.

Microsoft is also planning to release a new version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool and an update for the Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter.

What does Adobe have in store for us? Find out on page 2.