Valentine’s Day Gift from Microsoft – 9 Security Bulletins to Patch 21 Vulnerabilities

Microsoft is planning celebrate Valentine's Day by rolling out nine updates as a part of its Patch Tuesday update cycle through which it will address a total of 21 vulnerabilities.

Of these 9 updates, 4 have been labelled as ‘critical' while the remaining have been classified as ‘important'. These security updates will be aimed at a wide range of products in the Windows maker's entire portfolio, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and many others.

Microsoft has clarified that most of the bulletins demand the system to reboot before finally coming into effect. Out of the 9 updates, 7 are meant to patch vulnerabilities that may lead to remote code execution, if exploited successfully.

The alarming thing of these updates is that they would need to be applied across all the version of Windows operating systems ranging from Windows XP to Windows Server 2008 R2. Further, all internet explorer versions - i.e. 6 to 9, are also affected because of one or the other vulnerability and this a bit worrying as most attackers would exploit browser vulnerabilities to get their deed done.

This month's patch Tuesday would definitely keep the server administrators busy Windows 2008 R2 is affected by the greatest number of bulletins.

Microsoft's Security Bulletin Advanced Notification for February 2012 can be found here.