Before running out for the weekend, don’t forget to remind your staff of Microsoft’s upcoming Patch Day. While next week’s Black Tuesday isn’t the largest they’ve ever dropped, it’s no slouch, with eight Security Bulletins. Here’s what you should expect:
- Four updates for Windows and its components, all rated Important
- A Critical update for Internet Explorer (IE)
- A Critical update for the .NET Framework and Silverlight
- An Important patch to fix a vulnerability in Forefront Unified Access Gateway
- And finally, an important bulletin for Microsoft Host Integration Server
You can find a bit more about these upcoming bulletins, including their order of severity, in Microsoft’s Advanced Notification post for October. As usual, I recommend you try to install these updates as quickly as possible, especially the Critical ones.
I also recommend you test Microsoft patches before deploying them. That said, for desktop clients, I’ve started to relax my “test patches first” recommendation. As far as I have seen, Microsoft has not released a drastically broken client patch, which really adversely affects a desktop user, in quite a long time. On the flip side, research shows that many desktop users are falling behind in their patching, and have suffered for it. For those reasons, you’re probably better off letting desktop clients get auto-updates immediately. However, production servers are still a different story. While it’s still very important for you to patch them quickly, you should not install production server patches without a little testing. Mostly if they help keep your business running.
I’ll know more about these bulletins on Tuesday, October 11. Check out the WatchGuard Security Center then for the latest update. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)
Corey says “Microsoft has not released a drastically broken client patch, which really adversely affects a desktop user”
you didn’t get hit by Microsoft OFV (office file verification) then? – we had over a hundred users with their systems locked up when they tried to open Office files on a Windows server with Office 2003…. Microsoft’s first answer was to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010 !! That took us two days to solve.
I’d call that broken…. Microsoft have done us more damage with broken updates than any virus has managed.
Thanks for the feedback, Dave. That is a great point. No, I hadn’t run into that issue myself. I’m assuming you are talking about this:
http://windowssecrets.com/patch-watch/office-file-validation-patch-leads-to-problems/
That is certainly the type of reason why we’ve always recommended testing patches before deploying. In the past, Microsoft seemed to have these situation often, which is why many would hold off on patches. I “feel” like their patches have been more stable lately. However, I emphasize, “feel”, since I haven’t done any specific research to back that up. In any case, I still think it’s important for clients to get patches quickly.
Cheers,
Corey
Yep – that’s the issue.
One I haven’t solved and can’t prove… I had wake-on-LAN working a treat on my computer over a year ago… at some point since then has jiggered it, as I haven’t changed any WOL settings… it can only be WU… “Updates” and patches may be necessary but I hate them. And I resent having to waste my time and energy on patching someone else’s poor QC. If you want security I favour booting Linux from CD and never patching anything …. and I also don’t want to be forced to upgrade my hardware coz the perpetually-incremented OS is soaking up all my resources… ..
unfortunately we have to run Windows software.