Microsoft readies March Patch Tuesday fixes

Security administrators will be pleased to see this month's round of Patch Tuesday fixes will be fairly light, according to Microsoft's latest advanced notification.

The company plans to release two security bulletins fixing eight issues, all of which are rated 'important'.

"We recommend that customers review the Advance Notification web page and prepare to deploy these bulletins as soon as possible," said Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager at Microsoft, in a blog post.

"To provide additional guidance for deployment prioritisation, customers should note that both bulletins will address issues that would require a user to open a specially crafted file. There are no network-based attack vectors."

Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, advised companies to install the patches in order of their criticality.

"It is likely that the Office vulnerabilities should be handled first, as file format vulnerabilities in general have been on the rise in the last year, and end users frequently trust open office format files such as Excel due to their business oriented, serious nature," he said.

Bryant explained that Microsoft continues to investigate the F1 key issue discussed earlier in the week, and reaffirmed that no exploits had been discovered in the wild.

"We encourage customers to review the security advisory and apply the suggested workarounds where possible," he wrote.