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Big Patch Tuesday

It's the second Tuesday of the month. It must be Patch Tuesday. The last Patch Tuesday of the year is a doozy, with seven new security bulletins -- three of them critical. That's one more security bulletin than the company promised last week in its Advance Bulletin Notification Service, when the company tells the IT world what to expect on Patch Tuesday.

According to Symantec Security Response, the most critical bulletin of the bunch is the one providing a cumulative patch for Internet Explorer. The patch fixes a client-side code execution vulnerability. Says Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec Security Response, "Today's release from Microsoft reconfirms that client-side vulnerabilities are one of the most efficient and well known methods by which computers can become infected, therefore users are urged to install patches as soon as possible."

This Patch Tuesday has been closely watched by security experts because of the existence of a couple of zero-day exploits involving a couple of Microsoft Word flaws. Microsoft wasn't able to pull a patch together in this batch for those problems.

Posted by Scott Bekker on December 12, 2006


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