November 2012 Bulletin Release

Security Updates
Today we released six security bulletins to help protect our customers - four Critical, one Important, and one Moderate – addressing 19 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Shell, Windows Kernel, Internet Explorer, Internet Information Services (IIS), .NET Framework, and Excel. For those who need to prioritize deployment, we recommend focusing on these two Critical updates first:

MS12-071 (Internet Explorer): This bulletin addresses three privately disclosed issues, none of which are currently known to be under active attack. Successful exploitation of these issues could result in code execution with the current user’s privileges. As such, we recommend the best practice of running applications with the least privileges possible in order to help mitigate potential risks. These issues do not affect Internet Explorer 10.

MS12-075 (Windows Kernel): This security update addresses three privately reported issues, none of which are currently known to be under active attack. This bulletin affects all supported versions of Microsoft Windows. The most severe issue could result in remote code execution if an attacker is able to lure a user to a website with a maliciously crafted TrueType font file embedded.

Security Update Re-release
In October we released Security Advisory 2749655 that addresses potential compatibility issues due to signature timestamps expiring before they should and noted we would be providing updates as they become available. Today we are providing one such update for MS12-046 (Visual Basic), which is now listed as available in the advisory. We have also released MS12-062 (System Center Configuration Manager 2007) to address an issue in the localization of resource files. Users who have already successfully installed the English versions of this update do not need to take any action.

You can find more information about this month's security updates on the Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary web page. For an overview of the bulletins please watch the video below.

 

 

 

We recommend that customers deploy all security updates as soon as possible. Below is our deployment priority guidance to further assist customers in deployment planning (click for larger view).

 

Our risk and impact graph provides an aggregate view of this month's severity and exploitability index (click for larger view).

 

Thanks for reading and join us tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012) at 11 a.m. PST for a live webcast with Jeremy Tinder and myself, as we share greater details about these bulletins. As always, we will answer bulletin-related questions live during the webcast. You may register for that one-hour event here.

Thank you,

Dustin Childs
Group Manager
Microsoft Trustworthy Computing