Microsoft Patch Tuesday – December 2015

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 12 bulletins released which address 71 vulnerabilities. Eight bulletins are rated “Critical” this month and address vulnerabilities in Graphics Component, Edge, Internet Explorer, Office, Silverlight, Uniscribe, and VBScript. The other four bulletins are rated “Important” and address vulnerabilities in Kernel Mode Drivers, Media Center, Windows, and Windows PGM.

Bulletins Rated Critical

MS15-124, MS15-125, MS15-126, MS15-127, MS15-128, MS15-129, MS15-130, and MS15-131 are rated as Critical.

MS15-124 and MS15-125 are this month’s Edge and Internet Explorer security bulletin respectively. In total, 34 vulnerabilities were addressed this month between the two browsers with 11 vulnerabilities affecting both Edge and IE. The vast majority of the vulnerabilities addressed this month are memory corruption vulnerabilities along with a couple ASLR and XSS filter bypasses. One special note with this bulletin is that CVE-2015-6135 and CVE-2015-6136 are VBScript engine flaws that affect all supported versions of Internet Explorer. However, this bulletin only addresses these vulnerabilities for IE 8 through 11. Users and organizations who use IE 7, or that do not have IE installed will need to install MS15-126 to address these two vulnerabilities.