Critical Microsoft Office patch one of three Patch Tuesday releases

Stan Beer
Friday, 08 September 2006 22:06

Your IT - Home IT

It's that time of the month again for Microsoft and this time Patch Tuesday will bring us a security update for critical flaw in Microsoft Office, plus two less serious but still important patches for Windows.

• Announcements

The patch labelled as critical for Office could allow a remote attacker breach a user's computer without the user having to do anything.

Two further Windows patches have been labelled important, the second-highest ranking for seriousness, according to Microsoft in its usual pre-Patch Tuesday advisory.

Although two serious and one critical patch in a month are not an ideal communication to receive from the company supplying the world's most widely used software platform, it is a marked improvement on previous months, where as many as a dozen critical and serious patches have been necessary.

Last month, one of the vulnerabilities was so critical that an office of the US  Department of Homeland Security felt compelled to issue an alert to users.

As usual, Microsoft will post full details on the vulnerabilities on its site after the updates are released to users And as usual, users are encouraged to implement the updates as soon as possible to avoid fallout from zero day exploits.