Microsoft releases their July round of patches

Microsoft releases their July round of patches

It was the second Tuesday of the month yesterday and the software giant Microsoft released their monthly roundup of patches for their applications. The company officials announced that the patch releases fixes three critical vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities resulted in opening doors for remote code execution by hackers letting them take control of the user’s system. If they succeed, they get the privileges to make critical changes to the system including deleting user files.

One of these three critical bugs affects the popular word processing application MS Word. This font-parsing vulnerability affects Microsoft Word 2000/XP and Microsoft Works 2000/2001/2002/2003/2004 users. It can infect the user’s system if Word files containing the malicious code are opened within the application. This vulnerability affects especially the workstations on a network and the bug is corrected by modifying the way software validates the length of a message before it is sent to the allocated buffer.

Another of the critical vulnerability exists in the Microsoft’s color management module. It affects the systems running Windows XP/2000/98/ME and Windows Server 2003 platforms. The patch modifies the way it passed industry standard color management information to the buffer nullifying the problem. The third critical issue is with the JView Profiler affecting Internet Explorer 5 and 6, as well as Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems. It has been fixed in this latest security release as well.

Market analyst and field expert Brian Grayek spoke about these new patch release from the world’ largest software maker: “With Word, you’ve got to know of a lot of people out there that are not going to be quite as quick to patch their system; we’re talking mostly home users out there. With the Internet Explorer then you’re talking about a real close race for second place.” Considering the patches fixes two of the most widely used applications around the planet, the users are advised to update their machines with these latest patch releases from the official Microsoft website.