Patch Tuesday: Five critical for August 2009

Microsoft has issued an advanced security bulletin for August 2009 with five of the nine bulletins marked as "critical" and four are labelled as "important". These five critical patches are to patch remote code execution and the other four fix elevation of privileges and Denial of Service (DoS), where a hacker (or hackers) could allow Internet worms inside your computer without the use of user interaction.

The nine patches being released on Tuesday will fix flaws in a number of Microsoft products. The following software is at risk:

• Microsoft Office XP
• Microsoft Office 2003
• Microsoft Office 2000 Web Components
• Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
• Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 and 2006
• Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002
• Client for Mac
• Microsoft .NET Framework
  

Microsoft will issue patches on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 for the following Windows operating systems:

• Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
• Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3 *
• Windows Server 2003 (32bit, 64bit and Itanium-based systems)
• Windows Server 2008 (32bit, 64bit and Itanium-based systems)
• Windows Vista *
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 *

* Includes both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture

The updates will require the machine to be rebooted after installation.