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Four critical updates this Patch Tuesday

11 updates to be issued by Microsoft in October's monthly patch release: 4 critical.

Microsoft has prepared a total of 11 updates for the October round of its monthly patch release cycle, with four updates being rated 'critical'.

The four critical updates cover vulnerabilities in Active Directory, Internet Explorer, Microsoft HIS (Host Integration Server) and Excel. All the vulnerabilities could be exploited to execute arbitrary code from a remote source, hence their being given the highest rating.

In addition to the four critical updates, six more are rated 'important', while just one is assigned the lower rating of 'moderate'.

As always, users are advised to ensure they install updates as soon as possible to optimise security. More details on the release are in the advance notification, here.

Users are also warned to be wary of fake emails that have been circulating recently, which are designed to fool the recipient into believing they are from Microsoft and contain urgent updates, but which actually contain malicious code. While not crafted with a great deal of skill - for example including grammatical errors and referring to several versions of Windows which are no longer supported - their timing (to more or less coincide with the Patch Tuesday cycle) may be enough to fool unwary users. Microsoft, of course, never sends its updates as attachments to emails, and users are advised to receive updates through the Microsoft Update and Windows Software Update Services components or download directly from the Microsoft site.

14 October 2008

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