Bevy of critical Office fixes headline February patches

Microsoft plans to issue twelve patches next Tuesday, five of which deal with issues in its Office productivity suite.

Of those five, four are critical according to the company's advanced notice published on Thursday. All the critical patches deal with remote code execution errors, and all but one do not require a restart.

The Excel flaw that surfaced in the middle of last month is likely one of the critical flaws to be fixed, since it was both a code execution risk and Microsoft acknowledged it was working on a fix.

Also patched in the fixes marked critical are issues in Internet Explorer -- typically a cumulative patch when it is included -- as well as Windows, Visual Basic, VBScript, and JScript.

Among the five patches rated "important" by the Redmond company, fixes are en route for denial of service issues in Windows, Active Directory, and ADAM; elevation of privilege risks in Windows and IIS; and remote code execution flaws in Windows, IIS, Office, Works, and the Works Suite.

Typically Microsoft does not disclose the full nature of planned patches as a way to prevent hackers from using these vectors in attacks. While it does not always work, it at least decreases the threat.

More information on the patches included in next week's Patch Tuesday can be found on Microsoft's website.