Microsoft has Patchy day with record 26 flaws

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 11 October 2006 05:34

Your IT - Home IT

Patch Tuesday October 10 2006 has marked a new high in water line of flaws discovered in Microsoft software. In all, a record 26 flaws covering both Windows and Office products have resulted in Microsoft issuing 10 patches, six of which carry the most severe critical tag.

• Announcements

Some of the patches also apply to Windows Vista and two apply to Office on the Apple Mac. The Apple patches are rated as important but not critical, while information the specific Vista patches is still not available at the time of writing.

Of the most critical updates, four were for the Office suite. All of the main Office products - Word, Excel and PowerPoint - required updates to serious vulnerabilities that if exploited could hand over control of the computer to an attacker. One update affects the entire Office suite.

Critical updates were also issued for the previous flaw in the WebViewFolderIcon control used in the Windows Shell, for which exploits have already existed for weeks, and for the Windows XML parser.

The record number of flaws would have been even higher had Microsoft not been forced to issue an out of cycle fix for a much publicised zero-day attack on the VML (vector markup language) used for graphics in Internet Explorer.

Users who receive automatic updates may find that they get them a little late today due to technical problems at Microsoft's end. However, all patches can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/security.