News

Microsoft Readies a Light 4 for July Patch Tuesday

• By Jabulani Leffall
• 07/07/2011

Windows IT pros may be breathing a sigh of relief that the only fireworks in July occurred on a day off for U.S. workers.

Microsoft will only roll out four bulletins for this July's patch update, according to Redmond's advanced notification for its monthly security rollout. Of the four security bulletins one is "critical" and the remaining three have been deemed "important."

The risk considerations are split down the middle in July with two remote code execution (RCE) items and two designed to prevent elevation-of-privilege exploits.

The first (and only) critical item affects Windows 7 and Vista at the operating system level. The next two important elevation-of-privilege items touch every supported Windows OS. They come with a less threatening risk profile because of the requisite administrative access requirement to execute the exploits in question.

The last RCE bulletin in the group of important fixes deals with Visio 2003, which Rapid7 Security Researcher Marcus Carey says will not affect many people outside corporate circles.

"Organizations that are using Visio will need to (patch), and in the meantime should be wary of Visio files sent from unknown sources," Carey said.

All items may require restarts.

All told, security experts should be happy for the light fare as the dog days of summer loom because, if patterns hold, August should be a heavier month.

"Many companies will have limited exposure for the software affected and will be able to take a breather this month. This is a relatively small release as compared to last month's 16 updates and is consistent with the cycle of smaller patches every other month," said Amol Sarwate, Vulnerability Labs Manager for Qualys.

That may also mean there's extra time before the expected August rush for Windows IT admins to check out changes to the Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services in this Knowledge Base article.