Just as announced last Friday, Microsoft ships updates for plenty of products and closes 34 security holes. Many of them are rated critical which means that attackers can infiltrate vulnerable systems remotely.

The patches affect the Windows operating systems starting from Windows 2000 up to the brand new Windows 7. The vulnerable software is a lengthy list too: Internet Explorer, Media Player, Office from XP up to 2007, .Net runtimes, SQL server, Visual Studio 2003 up to 2008, Visual FoxPro, Report Viewer, the antivirus solution Forefront and Silverlight 2.

As the patches deal with critical security vulnerabilities which in some cases are already abused (like the FTP hole in IIS) it is advised to install them ASAP.

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor