I wonder if Microsoft is trying to compete with itself to see if they can break the all-time record of patch releases in a month. This month, they got pretty darn close. They tied for the all-time record of patches, which combines fixes for Windows, Office, IE and its anti-virus solution (which I will probably never be sold on).

Microsoft delivered its monthly batch of security updates on Feb. 13, delivering fixes for 20 individual problems in its products included in a dozen bulletins, six of which were dubbed as critical, the firm’s most severe vulnerability rating.

Among the security updates issued by Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft was a cumulative bulletin for the company’s Internet Explorer browser which seeks to address three issues all ranked as critical by the software maker.

Included in the IE bulletin were fixes for a pair of COM (component object model) instantiation memory corruption vulnerabilities, and a fix for an FTP server response parsing memory corruption issue. The issues are rated as critical in versions of the browser previous to its current IE 7 iteration in which they rank as only “important” or “low.”[more]

Tags: Computer Protection