RSSSuper Size Patch Tuesday No Valentine
By Ed Oswald | Published February 8, 2007, 5:43 PM
Just one day before Valentine's Day, Microsoft plans to release twelve patches fixing a variety of issues in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, and several other applications. At least five of these patches will be rated "critical."
There could be an easy explanation for the unusually large size of Patch Tuesday this month. Four patches slated for release last month were dropped at the last hour, including a Windows-Visual Studio update that appeared in the advanced notification but never appeared.
If all patches were delivered as expected, it would tie a record for most patches issued in a single month. The last time Microsoft issued this many patches was in August 2006, when ten patches fixed Windows issues, and another two fixed Office problems.
It is fairly likely that one of the Office updates will fix holes now being exploited by a range of zero-day attacks, most of which have appeared since December of last year. At least four unpatched issues exist, according to security researchers.
However, not all of them would be fixed, unless they are bundled into a single patch - only two fixes for Office are due, of which the highest rating would be "critical," and another for both Windows and Office, which has been rated "important."
Most of the patches will come for Windows -- five in total - with at least one being rated "critical." It is possible that the first confirmed flaw in Windows Vista could be fixed, which involves a memory buffer issue in the Win32 library.
BetaNews tests have shown the issue to also affect XP and older versions of Windows.
Of the rest of the patches, one each is expected for the following: an important patch for Windows and Visual Studio; an important patch for Step-by-Step Interactive Training; a critical patch for Microsoft Data Access Components; and a critical patch concern the company's OneCare, Antigen, Windows Defender, and Forefront security tools.
As is standard practice, Microsoft has not released any details of the issues to be fixed by Tuesday's release.
Hey where are all the overzealous fanboys now? They certainly run their mouths enough bashing other OS'...
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|Well this is to be expected, isn't it? I mean, I like Microsoft as much as the next guy, but there are so many (security) holes in all Microsoft software products (particularly Windows) that they could put swiss cheese to shame! And not just a single slice of it, OldCurlyWolf!
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|im glad to see a minimum of microsoft bashing here. still smelled a few stinky ms haters though. i ask u people that bash ms: have u ever delved into code/programming even a little? i have a little bit and im constantly amazed with what ms does and other companies do but ms especially. to create everything in ur comp by using code most people cant pronounce let alone understand is no small feat. so give the hard working MS employees a break. every single peice of software ever written has flaws regaurdless of who it comes from. at least they fix it consistently and for free.
and yes this is just business as usual. i dont see how betanews couldnt find something better to write about.
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|I love how people think patches are bad. I love patches!!
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|I tend to like patches too, but wait till you get a bad patch and you might disagree. As a sort of aside, driver updates (through Windows Update) for hardware tend to be messy. I updated a Radeon driver on Vista Business at work last week and it hosed the graphics. Had to tell WSUS not to approve it.
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|The numbers of patches for a piece of software depends on three main things:
- The number of bugs in the software
- The number of the software vendor's testers and how hard they work to find new bugs
- How popular the software is (more users means more bugs reported to the vendor).
People who look down on the number of patches a vendor comes out with tend to forget the last two points. Bugs exposed by the last two methods are positively *good* -- you want more patches as a result of them. In the case of Microsoft, no vendor has more users or more testers. So keep that in mind.
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|I really don't see what the problem is with patches (from anybody).
Of course this is always going to happen, the software providers are always one step behind 'reacting' to the worm/trojan/virus scattering scumbags out to exploit your average PC owner, how could it be otherwise?
Do folks slam AVG or McAfee etc etc for having daily updates? Sometimes several a day?
I don't.
For all the criticism I've never had a serious problem with my XP.
As annoying as repeated updates might seem personally I'm just very very glad Microsoft support the software to the degree they do.
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|Agree--would anyone rather us work on Windows XP WITHOUT Service pack's 1 or 2?
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|I still don't understand why patches are a bad thing. You pay for the license to use the software, you should expect the software vendors to do all they can to maintain it.
IMO, patches are a good thing - as long as they are free.
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|Patches are bad when they come from Microsoft. Yes they are free, but because it's Microsoft they are bad.
On the other hand, if it come from an Microsoft competitor such as Apple, it's all good. It cost money, since it's not Microsoft, it's good.
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|make your own os if you have such a low opinion of ms. it is a free market. If competiters made patchs, it would only make their products less stable, so they would in turn, buy the patch producers software. you have no argument.
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|dude. recognize a sarcasm when you see one.
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|I might have ragged on bugmenot earlier, but I got his sarcasm right off (and agreed with it).
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|I don't really see this as a bashing article, even if it is a bit mundane. To me it is a fairly notable patch Tues. since it's larger than normal and there's some known zero day sploits that have been going around since Dec. '06.
Wonder if WSUS 3.0 RC will be out in the next few days...
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|I too wonder about WSUS 3.0, since it'll be nice to have more functionality. However, my last attempt didn't want to recognize Vista systems and ended up causing a bit of a shambles.
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|I don't get the point of these articles, aside from an attempt to join on the "Bash Microsoft" bandwagon. Where's the news here? If it was an attempt to disseminate the information out to the public then I could accept that, but how can I accept it when it isn't followed up with "In other news Ubuntu released 80 patches last month"...which they did. I mean, great, thanks for the heads up I suppose but if your trying to point out Microsoft's failing, how about a little equality in your journalism.
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|I definately agree about this. For something that happens on a REGULAR BASIS for Microsoft and most other companies, it ceases to be news by about month 3.
If you still want to report on it, just change the title to "Monthly Patch Breifing" or somethign like that.
Want to take it a step further. Get patch info from MORE companies and make it a nice monthly report or RSS feed! That might actually be *helpful*
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|I've also noticed it seems a little inflationary to include all updates that can come through the Microsoft Update service. It seems odd, we don't hear about other companies entire product lines' patches at once.
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|Arakiel, I don't know if it's necessarily 'bash microsoft' so much as it is just being tired of having OS and other programns coming out with glitches unfixed. I don't know what the fix is other than more research and beta use within the companies who make them to find the glitches. The Downside to that being the companies would probably charge more for the programs. It just gets frustrating some days.
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|oh this is a big shock. I'm surprised there's not more for Vista though considering the fire wall has more holes in it than a slice of swiss cheese.
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|Probably because Vista hasn't had enough use (popularity) to create many exploits for it yet. Give it a while, and I'm sure they'll have to start patching it (nothing against Microsoft, but when such a huge market uses your product, someone's going to ruin it for everybody).
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|Not mentioned however, is that Office 2007 is unscathed.
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|Wow. It must be the most secure Office yet!
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|It does mention Office, actually.
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|Can't you see the 2007?
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|It's lasted a whole 3 months. Heh. I quite agree.
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|Maybe no-one's using it yet. ;)
Can't say I ever saw the point in hacking Office apps though. But then again, I'm not a hacker. :P
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|Sadly Excel is the worlds most popular "database". The data that gets stored in spreadsheets these days is scary.
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