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Microsoft plans to release four security bulletins July 13 for Patch Tuesday, including one to cover the security hole discovered by Google engineer Tavis Ormandy.
Two of the four bulletins cover Windows, while the others are related to Microsoft Office. All told, the company plans to fix five different vulnerabilities in its products.
The bug reported in June by Ormandy affects the Windows Help and Support Center function in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Ormandy’s finding has been controversial because he only gave Microsoft five days to provide a patch before going public, though his actions have been defended by some. The vulnerability has since come under attack.
Also being fixed is a vulnerability in the cdd.dll (Canonical Display Driver) that the company first warned about in May. The cdd.dll is used by desktop composition to blend GDI and DirectX drawing.
“The good news is that with the release of these four bulletins next week Microsoft will take care of the two recent security advisories listed below and address the Help Center, Windows XP and Server 2003 vulnerabilities that have been under attack now for a few weeks,” said Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at Lumension Security.
July also marks the end of Microsoft support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2, and the company is urging customers to upgrade to supported versions of the operating system.