It's "Patch Tuesday", the second Tuesday of the month, which means that later today Microsoft will release its latest bundle of essential security patches.
And we already know that it's going to be a big one.
According to an advance notice published by Microsoft last week, we know that the patches are designed to fix security holes in the likes of:
* Internet Explorer
* Microsoft .NET Framework
* Microsoft Silverlight
* Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway
* Microsoft Office
* Microsoft SQL Server
* Microsoft Visual Studio
* Multiple flavours of Windows itself.
Nine of the 16 bulletins have been given Microsoft's most serious severity rating - "critical" - because the flaws risk the sort of remote code execution attack we see commonly exploited by hackers to run malicious code on victims' computers, such as a worm.
That probably sounds bad enough, but what may create for some system administrators even more of a headache is that many of the patches will require Windows computers to be rebooted.
Just think about what your poor IT guys have to deal with on a regular basis, and remember to treat them gently on the second Tuesday of each month (and probably for a few days afterwards too!)
Whether you're a home user or a business it makes sense to apply Microsoft's security patches in a timely fashion - so don't delay, or you might find the cybercriminals are exploiting these vulnerabilities to take over your computer or gain control over your sensitive data.
Oh, and it's not just a day to update your Microsoft software. Adobe is issuing its security fixes for Adobe Reader and Acrobat too.
Microsoft is scheduled to release its security bulletins (and associated patches) at approximately 10am PDT (which is 6pm UK time).
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I always update my PC as soon as the patches come out. PS for UK customers, 15:00 GMT means 6 PM local time, right?
If you're in the UK, the patches will come out at 6pm local time.
The patch release may be at 6pm for the UK, but that's 1700 GMT *not* 1500 GMT.
The UK is in British Summer Time (BST) and that's 1 hour ahead of GMT...
That was a slight typo on my part. Meant 17:00 GMT not 15:00 GMT (the articled mentioned GMT not BST)...
This month's patch Tuesday is a wopping 116.6 mb!
About 80 mb for Windows XP. The 116.6 MB is for Windows 7 x64 SP1 IE9.
Always be careful when patching. I don't patch immediately as some of the fixes can cause problems with our production machines. Updates that get recalled a week after a release can be avoided if a little bit of cushion time is used.
I would recommend reviewing each patch on it's own merits - holding off on patching is a potentially very risky strategy. One patch may be more important than others and you may want to install that patch even though it may well be recalled - it may still plug a big security hole.