Surpassing its earlier patch record of 12 patches in one month, during February 2007 and October 2008, Microsoft’s forthcoming Patch Tuesday will comprise 13 security bulletins – fixing eight ‘critical’ vulnerabilities and five ‘important’ ones. Six of the 13 patches to be released will necessitate the restart of a computer.

All rating of ‘critical’ vulnerabilities was based on a remote code execution impact, which implies the possibility of a hacker’s potential control of an infected machine. The ‘critical’ severity ranking, thus, indicates that the patches will repair the flaws that enable hackers to launch malicious attacks remotely, in an attempt to steal information.

The coming Tuesday patch, which will also address the SMB and FTP vulnerabilities which were divulged last month, happens to be Microsoft’s release of first patches for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

The operating systems which are affected by the vulnerabilities include Windows 2000, Windows XP (x86 and x64), Windows Vista (x86 and x64), Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Windows Server 2003
(x86 and x64), Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64), and Windows Server 2008 R2 (x86 and x64).

With reference to the forthcoming patches, security experts opine that Microsoft’s responsiveness to zero-day flaws, in general, is apparently increasing – more so as the company has further invested resources into its security offerings like Forefront and the new free anti-malware scanner Microsoft Security Essentials.