The Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for July 2012 contains nine bulletins, with three listed as “critical” and six listed as “important.”

Many are expecting a patch for CVE-2012-1889: a vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services, which is currently being exploited in the wild. Microsoft released a temporary fix for this last month, and hopefully organizations will apply that while Microsoft works on a permanent fix; however, it isn’t clear whether that will be issued in the July Patch Tuesday release.

Bulletins 1 and 3 are critical bulletins that could result in full compromise systems without user interaction. These bulletins affect both business and consumer users of all modern versions of Microsoft Operating Systems, so they should be attention-grabbers. Microsoft will surely provide details next week on these two bulletins and users need to pay attention to these and patch as soon as possible.

Bulletin 2 relates to a critical browser vulnerability that affects Internet Explorer 9. It doesn't affect IE9's predecessors, which means that it was introduced in the latest iteration of the browser. If you are running IE9, you should definitely apply this patch now.

The rest of the bulletins are listed as important and should be tested and patched if organizations are affected.


Author: Marcus Carey, security researcher at Rapid7.