Tech Shout!

Microsoft has announced that it will issue six security updates next week for Windows, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Visio software.

The company said that four out of the six bulletins that are scheduled for June 12, 2007, will be ranked “critical”, while one each will be labeled “important” and “moderate”.

Also, according to Microsoft, half of the batch of security updates affects Windows Vista, or one of its components, such as Internet Explorer 7 or the Windows Mail email client. Out of the three Vista patches, two have been termed as “critical”.

Windows will have three updates, Internet Explorer just one, Outlook Express and Windows Mail will also have one each and Visio 2002 and Visio 2003 will also have one patch.

A separate table broke down the last by Windows version or component, with individual entries, for instance, representing Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64-bit, IE 6 for XP SP2, and IE 7 for Vista. If nothing else, this table gave users a much clearer picture of what is vulnerable, and how severe the bug may be for each edition of Windows. For example, the table showed that Vista will receive fixes for critical bugs in Vista’s Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Mail.

Users will have to wait until the bulletins are released for more details on the vulnerabilities, because even with the new information, it is practically impossible to predict all of Tuesday’s results in advance.

However, what is known is that there is at least one open Windows bug.

Assuming that Microsoft releases all six updates, users will have faced 35 bulletins in the first half of 2007, three more than the 32 in the first six months in 2006.

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates will be available for manual download from the Microsoft Web site. Stay tuned for more news on this.