Five 'Critical' Patches Planned for Tuesday

Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday promises a fuller slate with eight security bulletins

After some comparatively light patch rollouts in past months, Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday promises a fuller slate with eight security bulletins. Five are rated "critical" and two "important," with one rare "moderate" patch.

This month's round of security updates may have the most girth of any since October. The rollout is expected to include hotfixes for Windows programs and services, DirectX, and ubiquitous Microsoft applications such as Internet Explorer (IE), Excel and Word. All of the critical items have remote code execution implications. The important items are designed to stop two instances of elevation-of-privilege incursions. Finally, the moderate patch protects against denial-of-service attacks.

The first critical bulletin is described as a Windows fix and affects Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003. Meanwhile, the second critical Windows patch touches on all supported Windows client and server OSes.

All of the eight patches may require restarts.