Microsoft August Patch Tuesday takes aim at 22 vulnerabilities

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 August 2011 08:35

Business IT - Security

After a relatively quiet July, Microsoft plans to release a dozen security bulletins on August's Patch Tuesday.

A general trend has been for older versions of Windows to require more (and more important) patches than their successors. But Microsoft has given advance notification of 11 bulletins for Windows in August, and XP only gets one critical, three important and two moderate updates. By comparison, Windows Server 2008 R2 is the subject of two critical, five important and two moderate bulletins.

Anyway, whichever currently supported version of Windows you're running, there's at least one critical bulletin. The most widespread critical issue concerns Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9.

As for Office, there's another Visio bulletin. This one is rated important, and affects Visio 2003, 2007 and 2010.

On the developer tools side, there are a pair of important bulletins. One affects the Chart Control for .NET 3.5, the other Visual Studio 2005 and its associated Report Viewer.

At total of 22 vulnerabilities will be addressed by the August updates, which are scheduled for release on August 9 at around 10am (US PDT).

Updates for the Malicious Software Removal Tool, the Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter, and .NET Framework 4 have also been pre-announced, along with a rollup update for ActiveX Killbits and a "performance and reliability" update for Windows 7, Vista and Server 2008.