12 Patches Coming for Patch Tuesday

Microsoft said Thursday that it would release twelve patches as part of its August Patch Tuesday, with ten of them intended for Windows and two fixing issues in Microsoft Office. Both groups of patches are expected to have at least one "critical" issue.

Patches for Microsoft's flagship productivity suite have become a regular occurrence as a bevy of zero-day attacks have surfaced in recent months. The most recent was a PowerPoint exploit that appeared shortly after the July patch release.

The malware, dubbed Trojan.PPDropper.B, uses a malformed string to execute code and modify Explorer.exe. A fix for that issue will ship Tuesday, Microsoft said in mid-July.

On the Windows side, one of the patches could include an update to a previous fix. Last month, Microsoft patched an issue in the "mailslot" application in Windows, however code surfaced later in the month that appeared to take advantage of a new issue.

The Redmond company indicated that it was possible that an updated patch could be issued.

As is typical with Microsoft's advance notifications, details on other problems to be fixed were not disclosed. The company does this to prevent attackers from exploiting issues before they can be patched. While this has not prevented hackers from creating exploits after the patches are released, it does mitigate potential damage.

Other than the security patches, Microsoft also plans to release an update to the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. Additionally, two high-priority non-security updates would be released through Microsoft Update.