Tuesday will be patch day for Windows

While no security updates for Windows were included in Microsoft's previous two Patch Tuesday releases, the operating system will be at the centre of the collective update this coming Tuesday with five of the six announced bulletins affecting Windows. Microsoft plans to close a total of 19 vulnerabilities; most of them are rated critical by the company and enable attackers to inject malicious code remotely.

There will be patches for all currently supported versions of Windows from XP SP3 up to and including Windows 8, as well as the RT edition for ARM-based tablets. The Server editions of Windows will also be patched, and Microsoft has scheduled further patches for Internet Explorer, for the .NET Framework, and for Office (including the currently supported versions for Mac OS X).

Future Flash updates can also be expected to arrive on the second Tuesday of every month: Adobe has announced that it will sync future updates for its Flash Player plugin with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday schedule. The main reason for this is probably that Microsoft itself updates the Flash Player that is part of Internet Explorer in Windows 8 – which keeps causing out-of-schedule updates for Windows and generates twice the amount of administration work.

(djwm)