14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft rolled out a total of eight security bulletins as part of the first Patch Tuesday of 2015, thus trying to fix recently found vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system.
No other products are targeted by this Patch Tuesday rollout except for Windows desktop and Server, and the usual Internet Explorer patch that brings a new Flash Player version is also available.
One important thing that changed this month is the way Microsoft informs users about its Patch Tuesday rollout, as starting January 2015, the company no longer provides free advance security notifications.
These releases are only available to customers with paid Premier support contracts and organizations working in the IT security field, so regular users won’t know exactly what software gets patched every month.
One critical update this month
Surprisingly, out of the 8 security bulletins released this month, only 1 is considered to be critical, and the rest of 7 are labeled as important.
MS15-002 is the critical update and Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys, says that this is the first thing that users and IT administrators should install on this Patch Tuesday.
“If you run the Microsoft Telnet server this is your top vulnerability this month, especially if exposed to the Internet. At Qualys we do not see many people using Telnet in general, so this vulnerability should be fairly sparse - tune in over the coming months and we will have some statistics on this prevalence of this bulletin,” he posted.
As far as the Internet Explorer update bringing a new Flash Player version is concerned, Kandek says that a total of nine vulnerabilities are targeted by this patch, so users should also keep an eye on this one.
Internet Explorer 10 and 11 are getting this fix automatically via Windows Update, as Flash Player is by default built in the browsers.
Until now, we haven’t received any reports pointing to botched updates or any issues caused by this month’s Patch Tuesday bulletins, so it appears that everyone can safely install everything without the risk of experiencing post-installation computer issues.