Patch Tuesday to deliver “critical” update to Windows 8
Microsoft is getting its automatic update servers ready for its regular monthly “Patch Tuesday” event, which will be the first for 2013. Next week, on January 8th, the company will release a number of new software updates for various products, and they will include one that has been labeled as “Critical” for Windows 8 and Windows RT.
Today, Microsoft released its advance notification of the upcoming security bulletins, which offers up bare bones information of what to expect in terms of security patches that will be released for Patch Tuesday. Overall, Microsoft plans to offer seven updates, five called “Important” and two labeled as “Critical” that are designed to fix a total of 12 software issues in various Microsoft software products.
Four of the “Important” bulletins will affect Windows 8 and three are meant Windows RT, but just one of the two “Critical” bulletins are for Microsoft’s latest operating systems. However, the many users of Windows 7 PCs will get both “Critical” updates as well as Windows Server 2008 R2.
One security issue that apparently won’t be fixed next week was the one that was discovered in Internet Explorer 8, along with IE7 and IE6. Microsoft does not list any scheduled updates for any IE issue for Tuesday. However, it has already released a “Fix It” patch for IE6-8 that is designed to close the exploit ahead of a full security update.
As usual, the specific details about what is being fixed in these updates won’t be revealed until the patches themselves are available for download in order to not give hacker groups an advanced heads-up.
