Microsoft Makes Improvements for Windows and Microsoft Office

Microsoft made a few improvements to a number of loose ends in Windows and Microsoft Office – bye-bye hackers, it’s the end of those exploits! The patch list was small, there were only 4 updates aimed at the 5 bugs that were rated critical by the Microsoft security team.

There were a couple of surprises that Microsoft let us into:

• There were two Windows updates, developed to address already acknowledged bugs in Windows 7 and Windows XP. The MS10-042 bug was the most prominent among those 4 security upgrades because it addressed the vulnerability in Windows XP to a great extent.
• Microsoft may have a couple of grudges against Tavis Ormandy, the guy who published the attack code in Windows Server 2003. Tavis works at Google as a security engineer and Google rose to his defense, while blasting Microsoft of its shortcomings.
• Microsoft has strongly recommended all Windows XP users to apply the MS10-042 patch because of the level of vulnerability, they’re all exposed to. Windows XP is still used by 74% of all corporate machines.

Another update – MS10-044 was developed to handle two bugs. One of them was rated “critical” while the other one was rated “important”. Both bugs were categorized under the ActiveX threat plugins.

Every now and then, Microsoft sends small and big batches of security bugs, most of them are aimed at the bugs that still remain in dead technologies. ActiveX components are good example of that mundane technology.