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January Patch Day Has 3 Bulletins

January Patch Day Has 3 Bulletins Microsoft issued three bulletins on Tuesday in its monthly collection of patches for January.

The bulletins included a critical patch for Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2000, an important patch for Windows and a patch of moderate severity for Exchange Server 2003.

The ISA Server and Windows vulnerabilities both could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user's system. The Exchange vulnerability could allow a user of Outlook Web Access to randomly access another user's mailbox. Also on Tuesday, Microsoft re-released a patch from last year, MS03-045, to fix problems in the Thai, Hebrew and Arabic versions.

The Windows vulnerability actually involves a flaw in Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC). The affected versions of MDAC ship with Windows 2000, SQL Server 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

The new patches are the first since November, and the third set of monthly patches since Microsoft began releasing patches on a monthly basis in October. There were no security bulletins in December.

The bulletins are available at www.microsoft.com/security.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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