Microsoft Issuing Emergency Patches Tomorrow

For just the third time in two years, Microsoft is issuing emergency patches, these to fix holes in IE and Visual Studio Developer Suite.

It’s very rare for Microsoft to release security patches outside its regular Patch Tuesday cycle. But that’s what’s going to happen tomorrow, when the company issues patches to fix major security holes in the Internet Explorer browser and Visual Studio Developer Suite.

The IE patch is rated as critical, the one for Visual Studio one grade lower, at important. In a statement, the company said:

"While this release is to address a single, overall issue, in order to provide the broadest protections possible to customers, we’ll be releasing two separate security bulletins."

"While we can’t go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications. The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin. The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as Critical that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported."