Admins face huge April Patch Tuesday security update from Microsoft

Microsoft has announced that it will release 17 security bulletins to address 64 vulnerabilities in the monthly Patch Tuesday security update on 12 April.

Nine bulletins are rated as critical and the remaining eight are rated as important.

The vulnerabilities affect Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and GDI+.

Microsoft will provide a fix for the MHTML vulnerability and a fix for the SMB Browser issue that was publicly disclosed on 15 February.

"This is a huge update and system administrators should plan for deployment as all windows systems including Server 2008 and Windows 7 are affected by critical bulletins," says Amol Sarwate, manager, Vulnerability Research Lab, for Qualys

Frequently used office applications like Excel 2003 through 2010 and PowerPoint 2002 through 2010 are also affected, he said.