“On the second Tuesday of January Microsoft gave to me…”

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…two security bulletins for Patch Tuesday. Yep, you read that right: with only two security bulletins for users to take note of, this has probably got to be one more of the more lackluster Patch Tuesdays ever in Microsoft history. Not that it is a bad thing though.

Yep, it is that time of the month again. On the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft will release a series of security bulletins and patches for users to update their Windows installation with. And since Micrsoft has had a not-so-impressive track record with security as far as Windows is concerned, users have come to expect nothing but a huge chunk of security updates on Patch Tuesday.

Fortunately, it seems that Microsoft has got plans to start off 2011 on a quieter note, and this month’s Patch Tuesday is prove of that. Instead of leasing large numbers of bulletins like it has typically done in previous months, the Redmond giant has announced on its webpage that only two bulletins will be available for the month of January.

The first bulletin is rated ‘Important’ and surprisingly affects only one specific version of Windows, which happens to be Windows Vista. The other bulletin, though, is severe enough to warrant a ‘Critical’ rating and affects every single known Windows operating system from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

It should be noted that Microsoft had chosen to leave to vulnerabilities unpatched for this month’s Patch Tuesday; this includes the graphics rendering engine flaw which we had previously covered last week, and a certain vulnerability found in Internet Explorer. While the graphics rendering flaw has yet to be exploited, Microsoft has confirmed that it has seen cases of the Internet Explorer-related vulnerability being taken advantage of in recent days. Until a patch for the vulnerability can be issued, we’d suggest that users play it safe by switching to an alternative browser for the time being.

And there you have it: two security bulletins issued by Microsoft for the second week of the second day of January, with two security vulnerabilities left unchecked. Seems like the good guys over at Redmond had found a new way to make the number ’2′ appear a lot more meaningful than it originally was.

References: Microsoft Security Advisory via Ars Technica

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