InternetPatch Tuesday Targets 'Mammoth' Set of Flaws

After a quiet July, things are heating up on the vulnerability front.

It's Patch Tuesday today, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has released fixes for 11 security flaws -- six of which are rated "critical," the top-level alert, while the remainder rank as "important." The 11 security bulletins together cover a total of 26 vulnerabilities, making this Patch Tuesday one of the broadest in recent memory. Microsoft has not released this many bulletins since February, and has not patched as many individual vulnerabilities on a single Patch Tuesday in the past two years. "This is a mammoth Patch Tuesday, and we have not seen anything of this scale in a long time," said Karthik Raman, a research scientist at antivirus software vendor McAfee. The six critical security flaws relate to Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Media Access Player, Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Office. All versions of Windows, from Windows 2000 to Vista, and Windows Server 2003 and 2008, are impacted. Microsoft today also released an updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. RELATED ARTICLES Cyber Crime Grows More Dangerous, Sophisticated Oracle Patches 45 Vulnerabilities Will Design Flaws Flunk Firefox? Oracle WebLogic Server Rates a 10 for Big Flaw DNS Cache Poisoning Flaw Goes Ballistic An 'Important' Patch Tuesday Spammers Go for Olympics Gold For more stories on this topic: The latest Patch Tuesday comes as hackers continue... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]

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