For providers

While it may be the most wonderful time of the year, we know it can also be the busiest time of the year. With that in mind, we’re providing advance notification that next Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012, we’ll release seven security bulletins; five Critical and two Important, which address 11 vulnerabilities.

Hello, Today we’re publishing the November 2012 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. During the webcast, we fielded ten questions focusing primarily Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012 detection and deployment, MS12-072 (Windows Shell), and MS12-073 (IIS). All questions are included on the Q&A page. We invite our customers to join us for the next public webcast on Wednesday, December 12th at 11 a.

Security Updates Today we released six security bulletins to help protect our customers - four Critical, one Important, and one Moderate – addressing 19 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Shell, Windows Kernel, Internet Explorer, Internet Information Services (IIS), .NET Framework, and Excel. For those who need to prioritize deployment, we recommend focusing on these two Critical updates first:

Some of you may have noticed us improving our defense-in-depth practices for bulletins by supplying sha1 and sha2 hashes in the Knowledge Base (KB) articles. This has been most visible in the KB with the addition of the “File hash information” section, but it is also noted in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of each bulletin for convenience.

Today, we’re providing advance notification for six bulletins to help protect customers against 19 CVEs. The four Critical-rated updates will address 13 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and the .NET Framework. One bulletin rated Important will address four vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and finally, one Moderate update will address two issues in Microsoft Windows.

Today, in conjunction with Adobe’s update process, we have revised Security Advisory 2755801 to address issues in Adobe Flash Player in Internet Explorer 10. Customers who have automatic updates enabled will not need to take any action because protections will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who do not use automatic updates should apply the guidance in the advisory immediately using update management software, or by checking the Microsoft Update service, to help ensure protection.

Hello, Today we published the October Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. During the webcast, we fielded five questions focusing primarily on Security Advisory 2661254 addressing trust certificates with RSA keys less than 1024 bit key lengths. One additional question was answered after the webcast. All questions are included on the Q&A page.

As previously mentioned in the Advance Notification blog on Thursday, today we’re releasing seven bulletins, one Critical-class and six Important-class bulletins. Before we discuss those releases, let’s take a closer look at the Security Advisories we also released today. Security Advisory 2661254 We began discussing this issue in June, and originally released this advisory in August.

Today we revised Security Advisory 2755801 to address issues in Adobe Flash Player in Internet Explorer 10, in conjunction with Adobe’s update process. Customers who have automatic updates enabled will not need to take any action because protections will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who do not use automatic updates should apply the guidance in the advisory immediately using update management software, or by checking the Microsoft Update service, to help ensure protection.

Today we’re providing advance notification of the release of seven bulletins, one Critical and six Important, which address 20 vulnerabilities for October 2012. The Critical bulletin addresses vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word. The six Important-rated bulletins will address issues in Windows, Microsoft Office, and SQL Server. This release will also address the issue in FAST Search Server first described in Security Advisory 2737111.