Microsoft Security Update: The potential impact

The big story with the October 2009 Patch Tuesday Security Update from Microsoft is the sheer size (both breadth and depth) of the update. This is the largest update in the history of patch Tuesday.

Thirteen updates this month, with eight updates rated critical and the other five updates rated as Important.

The good news is that despite what one might think the impact on application compatibility is not huge across all the patches.

Based on the results of our application compatibility lab (c. 1000 sample packages), twelve of the 13 patches have very limited impact on applications. The one patch with issues is MS09-061 (Vulnerabilities in GDI+ Could Allow Remote Code Execution Which affects c. 13% of a sample application portfolio. We would recommend technical teams focus their testing on this patch.

We have included a brief snap-shot of some of the results from our AOK Software that demonstrates some of the potential impacts on Microsoft Office deployments with the following picture.



Testing Summary
MS09-050 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-051 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-052 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-053 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-054 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-055 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-056 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-057 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-058 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-059 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-060 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-061 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile.
MS09-062 : : Strong potential impact and large testing profile.

For the full report, have a look at:

http://www.changebase.com/News/NewsPage.aspx?page=20091013-01_PatchTuesday.xml&style=~/Style/PatchTuesday.xsl