Experts from across the security industry weigh in on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, which was its biggest ever with 13 patches and 34 vulnerabilities:
"MS09-062 is this month's whopper. Get this tested and get your systems patched. It would be faster to list technologies that this one doesn't affect. This one touches almost everything, with eight distinct vulnerabilities, mostly within GDI+, affecting Windows versions, Office components, Visual Studio, Forefront Client Security, and SQL Server."-- Sheldon Malm, senior director of security strategy at Rapid7
"Windows 7 held up pretty well in our opinion, not that it is out there much in use. But we think it points to architectural advantages it has over older Windows operating systems. In terms of development, Microsoft has invested in security technology, stack protection and non-executable code errors, which are techniques attackers use. It is all much tighter in Windows 7. We will see how it really works when Windows 7 becomes more popular and attackers focus on it."-- Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys
"Microsoft has repeatedly had to fix problems related to the Graphics Device Interface in Windows and vulnerabilities in the component have been exploited broadly in the past. We can expect that security researchers will be looking to reverse engineer today's patches, which may very well lead to exploits being created."-- Dave Marcus, director of security research and communication, McAfee Labs.
"MS09-050 is the highly anticipated patch for the SMB vs.2 issue, affecting Vista and Server 2008. While previous vulnerability databases have listed it as a denial-of-service, today's update confirms what the folks at Metasploit have been saying: it's a remote code execution. If you've deployed Vista or Server 2008 in your environment, get this patch tested and deployed immediately."-- Josh Abraham, security researcher at Rapid7
"Enterprises face a daunting task today as Microsoft releases its largest patch cycle to date covering a total of 13 advisories and 34 total vulnerabilities. While patches are now available for all issues, some of which had previously been publicly disclosed and exploited, the hard work now begins, with having to deploy patches to individual systems."-- Michael Sutton, VP of security research, Zscaler
