Advance Notification Service for December 2013 Security Bulletin Release

Today we’re providing advance notification for the release of 11 bulletins, five Critical and six Important, for December 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Microsoft Exchange and GDI+. The Critical update for GDI+ fully addresses the publicly disclosed issue described in Security Advisory 2896666.

This release won’t include an update for the issue described in Security Advisory 2914486. We’re still working to develop a security update and we’ll release it when ready. Until then, we recommend folks review the advisory and apply the suggested workaround on their Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 systems. Customers with more recent versions of Windows are not affected by this issue.

As always, we’ve scheduled the security bulletin release for the second Tuesday of the month, December 10, 2013, at approximately 10:00 a.m. PST. Revisit this blog then for analysis of the risk and impact, as well as deployment guidance, together with a brief video overview of the month’s updates. Until then, please review the ANS summary page for more information that will help customers prepare for security bulletin testing and deployment.

Don’t forget, you can also follow the MSRC team’s recent activity on Twitter at @MSFTSecResponse.

Thank you,
Dustin Childs
Group Manager, Response Communications
Microsoft Trustworthy Computing