Lots of security updates for XP

I noticed that my system was updating itself yesterday, but didn't pay much attention to it. Anyway, today I noticed it was doing it today so I visited Microsoft and saw there are loads of security updates for XP - 7+ of them.

That's a lot in a single day.

In fact, Spyware Blaster, SB S&D and Ad-Aware have also applied updates over 13th and 14th of Feb too. Must be someting rather exciting going on.

Yeah, I got the same - 10 Windows XP updates on my work and home laptops last night / this morning.

Microsoft released 12 security patches on Tuesday. They might not all apply to you. They had to fix a lot of stuff that has been exploited since October or so, as well as a few newly discovered issues. The last time they had this many patches at once was last summer.

I got 7 updates last night, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. I can't remember there being any other updates so far this year.

Wow. I feel special - I got 11 out of 12. =]

@GFK, there was 2 or 3 released on the second Tuesday of Janurary.

@puki, patch Tuesday seems to have become MS policy - second Tuesday of every month. Kinda defeats the purpose of Automatic Updates if you ask me.

Patch Tuesday is definitely MS policy. It is mainly to help out businesses, since patch deployments in large companies can require many days of testing. Back when they used to surprise the businesses with patches any day of the month, it was hard to plan and allocate resources to get the patching done in a timely manner. That said, they do still release out-of-cycle patches for things that are very critical, but those are few and far between.

Unfortunately "Patch Tuesday" also lead to "Exploit Wendnesday" -- any critical zero-day vulnerability released in the wild immediately after a patch tuesday can do a lot more damage than they could in the past when updates were released any random day...