Microsoft Will Ship Four Patches Next Tuesday

Microsoft will issue four security fixes in July’s Patch Tuesday next week, including one which repairs a hole found and disclosed by a Google engineer.

The four bulletins cover six vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Windows, including one hole exposed by Google engineer Tavis Ormandy. That bug, which affects the Windows Help and Support Center function in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 caused controversy because he only gave Microsoft five days to provide a patch before going public. Ormandy’s actions have been defended by some,but the vulnerability has since come under attack from hackers.

Also being fixed is a vulnerability in the cdd.dll (Canonical Display Driver) that the company first warned about in May. The cdd.dll is used by desktop composition to blend GDI and DirectX drawing.

“The good news is that with the release of these four bulletins next week Microsoft will take care of the two recent security advisories listed below and address the Help Center, Windows XP and Server 2003 vulnerabilities that have been under attack now for a few weeks,” said Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at Lumension Security.

July also marks the end of Microsoft support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2, and the company is urging customers to upgrade to supported versions of the operating system.