Microsoft Plans Eight Security Bulletins for Patch Tuesday

Microsoft is prepping eight bulletins for next week to address security issues in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Excel, Word and other applications. Six of the bulletins are rated "critical," while two others are rated "important."

Microsoft is planning to release six critical security bulletins as part of this month's Patch Tuesday.

In addition to the critical bulletins, there are two others rated "important" slated to make this month's round of fixes as well. The critical bulletins cover remote code execution issues in Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer, Word, Visual Basic and Windows. One of the Windows bulletins affects Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008. The other affects only Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

The IE bulletin affects multiple versions of the browser, including version 7. The Excel, Word and Visual Basic bulletins also affect multiple versions of those applications.

The bulletins rated "important" plug security holes in SharePoint and Windows Media Center. The SharePoint bulletin fixes at least one privilege escalation issue, while the Windows Media Center bulletin is focused on remote code execution.

The patches are scheduled to be released Dec. 9.