Patch Tuesday February 2011

If you were wondering if you could sneak in a bit of skiing in Chamonix next week instead of manning the IT support desk, you may want to think again.

Last year (2010) Microsoft released 17 security bulletins in December that affected 40 vulnerabilities across Microsoft Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SharePoint and Exchange. January was very quiet with 2 updates.

I have my suspicions that Microsoft's Security Release cycle is roughly 30 days long as you can quite often work your way back from a high-profile "Security" event and then see a subsequent Security update from Microsoft - 30 days later. Or, a simple thing like the Christmas holidays may cause a drop in updates released in January.

So, building up from this thinking, January was a busy month on the US-CERT Security updates website (found here: http://www.us-cert.gov/current/) which may cause a sharp rise in related Microsoft updates for February.

Here is small snippet of some of the recent posting that we may need to focus on;

February 2	VideoLAN Releases Security Advisory for VLC Media Player
February 2	Cisco Releases Security Advisory for Multiple Cisco WebEx Player Vulnerabilities
January 28	Microsoft Releases Security Advisory 2501696
January 28	RealNetworks, Inc. Releases Update for RealPlayer
January 28	Opera 11.01 Released
January 19	Oracle Releases Critical Patch Update for January 2011
January 14	Google Releases Chrome 8.0.552.237
January 12	Microsoft Security Advisory 2488013
January 12	RIM Releases Security Advisory for BlackBerry Enterprise Server
January 11	Microsoft Releases January Security Bulletin

From the look of these updates, I think that we are going to have a hefty February update with circa 8-10 Security updates from Microsoft.

I will keep you posted on our progress as the ChangeBase AOK team works through the Advance Security notification information