Executive summaries from the Advance Notification

Here’s how this “dirty dozen” breaks down, according to various categories of undoubted interest to Windows 7 (and other relevant version) administrators:

• Of the 12, 3 are rated Critical, and the rest Important.
• Of the 12, 9 require a restart, and the other three are labeled “May require restart.” Plan on restarting all updated Windows machines.
• The severity ratings break down this way: 5 qualify as Remote Code Execution (including all 3 critical items); an equal number are rated as Elevation of Privilege, and there is one each Denial of Service and Information Disclosure.
• Affected OSes include Windows XP (which gets a rare update, even though it’s out of conventional support), Windows Vista, and Windows 7, plus Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2.

Apparently there’s “something for everyone” in this upcoming round of updates. For more information on such details as are presently available (the whole story won’t be made public until MS releases the updates at 11 AM EST on Tuesday, 2/8/2011) see Jabulani Leffall’s excellent story for Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine “Microsoft Preparing Hefty 12-Item Security Patch on Tuesday.”