Microsoft readies massive Windows update

In case you are wondering why your computer behaves oddly tomorrow, it is because your Windows automatic upgrade is downloading the mother of all patches.

Normally the Vole delivers any security patches on the second Tuesday of the month, and tomorrow it is planning a big one.

Microsoft said that this patch is aimed at all the Windows versions, from XP up to Windows 8.1.  This means that we are dealing with some ancient flaws that are part of the bedrock of the Windows system.

Microsoft will release, on 9 July, a number of seven security patches that are rated as ‘critical’.  This could be the last time that we see an upgrade for Windows XP as on 8 April, 2014,  Microsoft will officially kill support for the ancient OS.

The updates are said to fix “remote code execution vulnerabilities” although there is also a patch that will fix the privilege flaw in Microsoft’s Security Software package.

By “remote code execution vulnerabilities” vole means those holes in the system that hackers can exploit.

This particular release is one of the nastiest from Microsoft this year.

If Redmond is saying all Microsoft products are critically affected, it boils down to: “if you don’t fix this your computer and those in your network really are screwed”.

Security experts have not been able to tell us what they expect in this edition.  But tomorrow they will be going over it with a fine tooth comb to see what is in the package.

After all it means that there is a problem with the super-secure Windows 8 that has existed since the days of XP.

Since it is a patch which cannot be ignored it means that company security teams are going to be flat out making sure that it does not break their networks.

Three of the bulletins roughly match the profile of the issue Google’s Tavis Ormandy disclosed back in May.

This was a big memory management problem in the win32k.sys component of Windows (codename CVE-2013-3660).

According to some security experts, Windows has already released more security updates this year than it had in all 2012.