Microsoft announced yesterday that it's preparing to unleash a whopping 16 bulletins next week. Slated for June 14, this month's Patch Tuesday will address 34 vulnerabilities across many products. The update follows a comparatively light cycle in May, which included only two security bulletins.
Of the 16 patches, nine are labeled "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating, while the remaining seven are deemed "important." All of the critical flaws can lead to remote code execution, while the others can enable denial of service attacks, information disclosure and elevation of privilege.
Seemingly every supported version of Windows is affected, spanning from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 SP1 and their respective Server counterparts. IE6 through 9, Silverlight, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 through 2010, as well as all supported versions of Office for Windows and Mac are also listed.
IT professionals can expect a busy day, as more than half of the updates will require a reboot. In fact, June as a whole will be quite hectic. Adobe's quarterly patch is due next week and you can expect various fixes for Adobe Reader X, Acrobat X and earlier versions for both Windows and Mac systems.
Next week will also bring a new version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool. Earlier this week, Adobe released an out-of-band patch for Flash to address a vulnerability being actively exploited, and Oracle shipped a bundle of critical updates for Java SE covering various versions of JDK and JRE.
