Upcoming Patch Tuesday looks small once again

Microsoft’s March Patch Tuesday is again shaping up to be on the lighter side of some months, continuing the 2014 trend of smaller Patch Tuesdays.

We only see 2 issues that are critical/remote code execution, one of which is the usual IE, the other is an Operating System issue which affects most versions of Windows from XP up to 8.1/2012r2. These two are where we should focus our patching efforts.

Of the remaining issues, one is an important privilege issue, probably going to be a kernel or kernel driver patch. Never something to ignore but less important than a critical/remote issue.

The other two are the seldom seen “security mechanism bypass” type, probably the same issue being patched in Windows and in Silverlight. We will have to wait and see how exploitable this turns out to be. If it turns out that some of these issues are “in the wild” and under exploitation, then that will be change the circumstances of what to prioritize.

Author: Ross Barrett, Senior Manager, Security Engineering, Rapid7.