Microsoft announces its February Patch Tuesday

SOFTWARE PATCH HOUSE Microsoft is preparing its biggest February Patch Tuesday, which will contain nine update bulletins.

The shedload of patches will be released on 14 February, so IT administrators will at least get something for Valentine's Day even if no cards arrive in the post. The nine bulletins will fix a total of 21 vulnerabilities.

The first four bulletins are rated critical, the highest rating the firm uses, and all relate to remote code execution. The remaining five bulletins are graded as important, the second highest rank, three of which also relate to remote code execution.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of IT security firm Qualys said, "There is the expected critical update to Internet Explorer which should be highest priority. After all, we saw last month how quickly attackers are incorporating browser based attacks into their toolkits; an exploit for MS12-004 was detected a mere 15 days after Patch Tuesday."

Other than the fix for Internet Explorer, the patch will fix issues in Office, the .NET framework, Silverlight, Server Software and Windows itself. Nine bulletins mean it's got two more than January's raft of seven bulletins.

Bulletin seven will only be applicable to Windows Server 2008 and R2 users while bulletin eight applies only to those running Windows XP Service Pack 3. µ