Big Patch Tuesday On Way

Tomorrow, Microsoft will patch 25 flaws in its operating system, e-mail software, and Office. For its part, Adobe will release a security update for Acrobat and Reader and provide a new way for its customers to receive updates.According to its Advance Notification bulletin, Microsoft will issue 11 security bulletins tomorrow that will repair a total of 25 flaws in Windows, Office, and Exchange. Not a single current version of Windows make it unscathed. Even Windows 7 is getting patched.

Five of the vulnerabilities are ranked as critical, eight of the bulletins describe flaws that make remote code execution possible, and most of the patches will require a system reboot.

While security and operations teams will be managing their Microsoft patches, they better not forget the slew coming from Adobe that same day. From its advanced notice:

"Adobe is planning to release updates for Adobe Reader 9.3.1 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3.1 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2.1 and Acrobat 8.2.1 for Windows and Macintosh to resolve critical security issues. Adobe expects to make these quarterly updates available on April 13, 2010."

However, according to this story by Thomas Claburn, Adobe will not be patching one of the most critical security risks the PDF standard faces:

"A vulnerability identified last month in the ISO standard PDF specification, which can be used to trick users of PDF viewers like Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader into authorizing the execution an embedded executable, will not be addressed in next week's update.

"We are currently researching the best approach for this functionality in Adobe Reader and Acrobat, which we could conceivably make available during one of the regularly scheduled quarterly product updates," the company said on Tuesday.

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Adobe will also be releasing a new version of its update software that will make it possible for users the option to automatically download Adobe updates.

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