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Microsoft Plans Seven Patches For July
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-07-07
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Patch Tuesday arrives next week, and Microsoft will provide a total of seven updates for the Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite.
 | | Microsoft Plans Seven Patches For July |  |
Some of the updates Microsoft will deliver on July 11th contain fixes for Critical issues in both Office and Windows. Microsoft announced its next update of seven security bulletins with that news.
The company does not discuss what is being patched ahead of the release date. This happens because a patch may address a problem that had been reported privately to Microsoft. Giving malicious attackers advance notice of an unpatched flaw could result in exploits hitting the Internet before the patch does.
Even with this precaution, some problems revealed by Microsoft on its monthly Patch Tuesday update do not get patched right away by users. In recent months, virus writers have crafted exploit code in a matter of days for flaws revealed by Microsoft's issuance of the newest security bulletins.
A couple of existing vulnerabilities that were publicly revealed on the Secunia advisory site should be candidates for the next batch of patches from Microsoft. These issues were reported after June's Patch Tuesday updates took place.
An Extremely Critical issue in Excel had been discovered in the wild. Despite its threat potential, this zero-day vulnerability can be avoided if users refrain from opening untrusted Excel documents.
Another flaw rated as Highly Critical can be avoided in the same manner as the previous one. This vulnerability in Windows is related to Excel, as a problem with the way Excel handles hyperlinks in spreadsheets.
Clicking a malevolent hyperlink could lead to a boundary error in a .dll, creating a dreaded stack-based buffer overflow. Once exploited, arbitrary code delivered by the attacker may be executed on the system.
Although they are both serious vulnerabilities, their potential for impact can be mitigated. On the business side, communicating with staff about these issues, and stressing the need to be suspicious of untrusted documents instead of just opening them automatically, can be of great help.
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Tag: Microsoft
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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