Windows Gets Largest Security Update in Over a Year

Thanks to Radish for the heads up

12. That's the number of updates to be released with the June security patches. Of the twelve, nine are specific to the Windows operating system itself and one of those is listed as "critical" designating it as a severe security concern. Two are related to the Microsoft Office productivity suite and one is for Microsoft Exchange e-mail server.

Of the 12 updates, one of the Office patches fixes a back door in Microsoft Word that was discovered in May and was exploited by the Backdoor.Ginwui virus. Another of the 12 updates is the result of a $521 million dollar lawsuit against Microsoft by Eolas Technologies Inc. As part of the settlement Microsoft had to disable ActiveX from automatically starting when users visit some web sites. Prior to this update users were able to apply this change to their browsers at will, but the patch makes it mandatory.

Microsoft also stated that they will not fix a back door in Windows 98 and Windows ME that was discovered in April of this year. They claim that to do so would require a major re-write of the Windows Explorer version in those products. Support for those versions of Windows officially ends on July 11th of this year.

Microsoft releases security patches on the second Tuesday of each month, which happens to be today. They are urging users to download this months updates as soon as they are made available and are going a step further by suggesting that those running older versions of Windows should upgrade to newer versions such as Windows XP SP2 as soon as possible.

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