As they do every month, Microsoft has plans to release new patches for software products in what has come to be known in the industry as "Patch Tuesday." The latest update will come on October 9th with seven updates planned that will fix a total of 20 issues.
Microsoft"s website labels one of the updates as "Critical". The update is specifically for users of Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. As usual, the specific details about what is begin fixed in this critical update won"t be revealed until the patches themselves are available for download in order to not give hacker groups an advanced heads-up. However, it will require a restart of Windows.
The other six updates in next week"s "Patch Tuesday" are all labeled as "important" by Microsoft. Three of them fix issues found in Microsoft Office while other updates will address problems in versions of Microsoft Windows itself, along with its server and SQL products and its Lync software.
Last month, Microsoft made two software updates for Internet Explorer that were out of its normal "Patch Tuesday" cycle. One fixed an exploit that was discovered in IE 7 to 9, and the other updated Flash to a newer version in Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8.