Microsoft is planning to close out the year with seven security bulletins next week for Patch Tuesday.
Three of the seven bulletins are rated ‘critical’ and have to do with vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.
“With the balance of next week’s bulletins impacting Windows, December will be a month for IT to focus on the desktop,” noted Russ Ernst, director of product management at Lumension. “This isn’t to say servers can be ignored however – it looks like Microsoft will also release the Exchange update originally planned for the November – and this fact is especially true if you’re still using Windows Server 2003. Earlier this month we saw alerts issued by The Department of Homeland Security urging businesses to migrate before the July 14, 2015 end of life.”
Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7, noted that in addition to IE, the critical issues affect all supported versions of Microsoft Office and SharePoint, as well as all supported versions of Windows prior to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
“We also see an Important Elevation of Privilege patch for MS Exchange, presumably this is MS14-075 which was held back from the November updates for quality issues,” he said, adding there are also bulletins ranked ‘Important’ affecting Windows and Office.
“The Windows issue is an Information Disclosure vulnerability affecting all support OS versions,” Barrett said. “The others are Remote Code Execution issues in Office which fall below the Critical risk level, probably as they are deemed to be less exploitable.”
Patch Tuesday will be Dec. 9.