Microsoft is making preparations for its regular monthly Patch Tuesday software update event, which this month will happen on September 10th. However, the company will be releasing a lot more security bulletins than normal next week.
Today, the company released a summary of the bulletins it will release in five days, revealing there will be a total of 14 security updates, which is the most that Microsoft has released in one month so far in 2013 (February came in second with 12 security updates). Four of the bulletins are labeled as "Critical" while the other 10 have been given the "Important" designation.
As usual, today"s summaries does not go into any specifics behind these updates so that hackers don"t get too much information on the patches before they are released. However, the summaries do indicate that the four "Critical" bulletins will be released to fix issues in various versions of Windows, Outlook, SharePoint and Internet Explorer.
Next week"s Patch Tuesday event will come less than seven months before Microsoft cuts off all public support for Windows XP. Microsoft has already warned that after the cut off date of April 8th, 2014, it will leave the 12 year old operating system with "zero day" bugs forever; Five of next week"s security bulletins fix issues in Windows XP.
Source: Microsoft