Microsoft Plans Patch Tuesday Fixes for 11 Security Vulnerabilities

Microsoft is prepping six security bulletins to cover 11 vulnerabilities as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday.

The vulnerabilities exist across Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Forefront United Access Gateway (UAG) and the .NET Framework. Four of the six bulletins are “critical” and cover bugs that could lead to remote code execution, while the remaining two bulletins are ranked as “important.” Of those latter two bulletins, one deals with remote code execution and the other information disclosure.

“So far this year Microsoft has been issuing a fairly stable number of patch Tuesday bulletins every month,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle. “We saw seven bulletins in January, nine in February, and six in both March and April. This is quite a bit different than their historical pattern of dramatic swings in bulletin volume from month to month.”

Bulletin number four – one of the critical ones – has the potential to cause IT security teams some serious headaches because it covers Office, SQL Server, Biztalk, Commerce Server, Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic, Storms said.

“Anytime a bulletin covers such a wide range of products, IT security teams have to pause and think hard about deployment,” he said. “It also requires some rigorous patch testing.”

“It’s questionable whether or not we’ll get a patch for the Pwn2Own bug we heard so much about in early March in this update,” he added. “Historically, Microsoft’s development cycle is about 30 days for a regular IE patch, so it seems unlikely we’ll get a patch this bug next week.”

The bulletins are slated to be released April 10.

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