Yes, it is this time of the months again. Microsoft has just released this month's security bulletins for its Windows and Office products.
The company has released a total of seven bulletins targeting different client and server versions of Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Security Software, and the Microsoft .Net Framework.
Four bulletins have received the highest severity rating of critical, while the other three one of important, the second highest rating.
This means that at least one product is affected by the severity rating, while others may have received the same rating, a lower rating, or may not be affected at all.
The information that you find below provides you with all the information you need to deploy those patches on your system. They help you understand what each bulletin addresses, how it is deployed, and provide you with links to Microsoft pages for additional information.
Video Summary
Operating System Distribution
Six of the seven bulletins address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows client or server software. Least affected on the client side are Windows XP and Windows Vista, followed by Windows 7 and then Windows 8, 8.1, RT and RT 8.1 which are all affected by the most vulnerabilities.
The situation is similar on the server side. Server 2003 and 2008 are the least affected products, followed by Server 2008 R2 which is affected by one additional bulletin, and then Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2 which are affected by one additional bulletin.
Office Distribution
There have been no bulletins this month that address security issues in Microsoft Office products.
Microsoft Security Software
Deployment Guide
Microsoft suggests the following deployment priority for this month's bulletins.
Security Bulletins
Other security-related contents
Non-security related updates
How to download and install the February 2014 security updates
All security updates are provided via Microsoft's Windows Update service. If the automatic update feature is enabled, updates are distributed automatically to PCs.
You can speed up the discovery of updates though by opening Windows Updates on your system to run a manual check for updates.
If you have blocked automatic updates for more control over the updating process, you may download updates from Microsoft's Download Center website instead were all are made available as well. There you will also find the monthly security ISO image that Microsoft creates, containing all security patches released for that month.
Downloading updates manually makes sense in certain situations. If you need to deploy updates to several local PCs, you will save bandwidth doing so as you only need to download the updates once to deploy them on all PCs.
You can also use third-party software that downloads all Windows patches to your system.
Additional information
Please click on the following link to open the newsletter signup page: Ghacks Newsletter Sign up
Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
30 security bugs. None has been found by Microsoft’s security team, all by outsiders.
24 security bugs in IE copied over and over from the 13 years old IE6 up to Windows 8.1’s IE11.
Thanks Martin, For guiding me threw main 21 Microsoft 7 pro system updates from this mouth!
I use the WSUS Offline Update
from http://download.wsusoffline.net/
As always, thank you very much Martin for your article on the Microsoft monthly updates :)
It appears that a few non-security related updates for Office 2010 were released by the end of January. They can be found in the MS Download Center.
Yes there was 7 updates for Office 2010 on Win 7 – 8.1. The one note update screwed up all the printer functions (HP) was a pain to reload them all. Lost most of the printer Programs in Win XP, give up on a sony Vaio office 03 on it after reloading the HP progams for the printers as it could not find them or would only half load
I followed your link to Microsoft’s Download Center (towards the end of your article), and then clicked on the Microsoft Update box in the upper left of that page. And started to laugh. Firefox popped an alert that says, “www.update.microsoft.com uses an invalid security certificate”.
Anyone realized the @Skydrive (soon to be @OneDrive) icon is back in the taskbar/ notification area of @Windows 8.1? Not sure about other systems/ versions of Windows.
It took me a while to find the URL of the page with “the monthly security ISO image that Microsoft creates”, so here it is:
Title is: Security updates on ISO-9660 DVD5 image files…
URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913086