Do you just absolutely adore applying patches because you know they make your systems more resilient against attacks? If so, do I have good news for you. Next Tuesday is Microsoft Patch Day… Whoohoo!
Based on their Advanced Notification page, Microsoft plans to release nine security bulletins on July 10, and they rate three of the bulletins as Critical. The updates will primarily fix vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office.
While they don’t specifically mention it in their Advanced Notification post, Microsoft has confirmed they will fix the zero day XML Core Services vulnerability I mentioned last month. You’ll want to apply Microsoft’s Critical patches as quickly as you can next week; for this flaw, if anything else. In general, I recommend you install the Critical updates first, and that you test the updates before deploying them — especially any server related updates.
While patching really is a good thing, it also requires a significant amount of work. I doubt anyone is quite as excited for Patch Day as I alluded to at the beginning of this post. That said, I still recommend you prepare your staff to deploy Microsoft patches as quickly as you can next Tuesday.
I’ll know more about these bulletins on Tuesday, and will publish alerts about them here. — Corey Nachreiner, CISSP
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