Today is the first month since 1998 in which Microsoft stopped releasing security bulletins with the familiar MSxx-xxx format and replaced it with the new security update guide. We talked about this change earlier in a few blog posts and finally today it’s time to say good bye to security bulletins which essentially combined related vulnerabilities and products for easy of consumption.

In today’s release Microsoft fixed a total of 45 vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution, denial-of-service, elevation of privileges, security feature bypass and spoofing. Top priority goes to the Office and WordPad CVE-2017-0199 which fixed a 0-day vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild. Exploitation of this vulnerability requires that a user open or preview a specially crafted file with an affected version of Office or WordPad. Attacker could accomplish this by sending a specially crafted file to the user and then convincing the user to open the file. We recommend administrators patch this as soon as possible.

Continue reading …

Its July 2016 patch Tuesday and Microsoft has released 11 security updates that affect a host of desktop and server systems. Six updates are categorized as Critical while the rest are categorized as Important.

Most of the critical updates released today affect desktop systems. Top priority should be given to fixing browsers and Office which includes MS16-084 that affects Internet Explorer, MS16-085 which affects Microsoft Edge and MS16-088 for Office. All three updates fix vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to take complete control of the victim’s machine and therefore these should be patched immediately.

Continue reading …

This month Microsoft is publishing 14 bulletins with new versions and patches for its software, operating systems and applications. This is one fewer bulletin than Microsoft had announced last week.

Continue reading …