Microsoft announced plans to issue six security bulletins for this month’s Path Tuesday. Of the scheduled fixes, four are considered critical, one is rated important and one is marked moderate. Two of the four critical security bulletins fix flaws either Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista or Windows Mail in Windows Vista.

The critical patches address vulnerabilities whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action. Typically, Microsoft considers an update critical when the bugs indicate a system could be compromised remotely with no or minimal interaction required by the user.

The one security bulletin that received Microsoft’s second-highest threat rating of important affects Visio 2002 and Visio 2003 (business software used to create technical drawings). It is not clear why this patch is not considered critical as the flaw being fixed also enables remote code execution.

Microsoft considers an update important when exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.

The latest Microsoft operating system, Windows Vista, also received a security bulletin that’s rated moderate. The ‘moderate’ security bulletin is issued when the exploitability is mitigated to a significant degree by factors such as default configuration, auditing, or difficulty of exploitation.

The announcement also reflects changes to Microsoft updated process. The new Advance Notification Service includes additional details such as the severity rating of upcoming updates, the impact of the vulnerability, detection information and the affected software for each security bulletin.

The additional information is designed to better help administrators prepare for the testing of the updates and deployment.

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Related:

Microsoft makes tenuous ‘critical-free’ claim for Patch Tuesday

Microsoft to patch Vista flaws this week

Windows Live Mail to replace Windows Mail

Microsoft fixes Windows Mobile and Vista synch problem

Google fixes Chinese language software tool, now safe for Windows Vista users

Entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 5:48 pm under Vista.  Print This Post

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