Microsoft’s last Patch Tuesday of 2012 has been released with seven new security bulletins, five of them are rated ‘critical’. If you use Windows, Microsoft Office, or Internet Explorer, you’ve got some work to do to get these new patches applied.
MS12-082 and MS12-083, security bulletins related to flaws in DirectPlay and IP-HTTPS respectively, are rated ‘important’. The critical security bulletins apply to the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Exchange Server – and a few of them require a restart for the patch to take effect.
Barring some sort of urgent zero-day exploit requiring an out-of-band patch, Microsoft will finish the year with a total of 83 security bulletins. That is a 17% drop from 2011, and a more than 20% drop in the annual security bulletin total compared to 2010.
It’s not all about the security bulletins themselves, though. Each security bulletin might actually address a handful of underlying vulnerabilities, so the number of security bulletins don’t necessarily tell the whole story.
What is arguably more impressive than the general decline in total security bulletins is the more consistent number of security bulletins from month to month this year. The past couple years it seems like Microsoft has gone from one or two security bulletins one month to 10 or more the next month like a yo-yo.
IDG News Service
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