A Slew of Patches Plus Two Zero-day Exploits

Microsoft unleashed 8 security patches today. The new patches include fixes for Sharepoint, Windows Media products, Excel, Word, Visual Basic ActiveX controls, Windows Explorer, GDI image parser, Internet Explorer, and Wordpad. It's going to be a busy week for security administrators tasked with patching system. All of the patches are critical except for the Media products and Sharepoint patches, which Microsoft considers to be rated "important."

The bad guys unleashed 2 zero-day exploits that affect Wordpad and Internet Explorer are already in circulation - and the current patches will not protect your systems. You've been warned!

The Wordpad problem involves Word 97 documents, where a specially crafted document could lead to the execution of arbitrary code when the document is opened by Wordpad. The Internet Explorer exploit involves processing XML data, which could lead to memory corruption that might allow the execution of arbitrary code.

Time to get those systems patched ASAP!