Patch Tuesday heralds a busy spell for admins

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 15 June 2011 09:14

Business IT - Security

As expected, Microsoft and Adobe have released a hefty batch of security updates for their products.

June's Patch Tuesday marked a busy time for system administrators, especially those who need to carry out extensive testing before deploying updates to computers under their control. Both Microsoft and Adobe released a raft of security-related updates.

As expected, Microsoft released 16 bulletins, nine critical and seven important, while multiple Adobe products were updated for security reasons. Let's begin with Microsoft.

The 16 bulletins cover 34 vulnerabilities in various products.Seven of the bulletins concern Windows, and there are critical bulletins for all currently supported versions. While Microsoft recommends its customers apply all of the updates as soon as possible, it suggests particular priority should be given to four of them.

They are MS11-042 (two critical vulnerabilities in Distributed File System), MS11-043 (critical vulnerability in Windows' SMB client), MS11-050 (11 vulnerabilities - some critical - in Internet Explorer versions 6 to 9), and MS11-052 (critical vulnerability in Vector Markup Language).

Other bulletins concern Excel (important patch for Excel 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, and associated utilities), InfoPath (important patch for InfoPath 2007 and 2010), SQL Server important, 2005 through 2008 R2), Silverlight 4 (critical on all versions of Windows and Mac OS X), Visual Studio (important, for Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010), and the Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Client (critical).

Chester Wisniewski of security software vendor Sophos pointed out that the Office for Mac updates incorporate fixes that were released last month for the Windows versions of Office. "This makes MS11-045 a high priority update for Mac Office users," he suggested.

More on Microsoft and the latest on Adobe's updates on page 2.