Patch Tuesday Update December 2019

There have been 36 security releases involved in this ‘Patch Tuesday update’ including 7 critical and 28 important updates affecting a range of Microsoft products including Windows, SQL Server, Hyper-V Server, Office and Office Services.

The company also made sure to remind users of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that they’ll no longer be receiving updates after January 14 2020. And it urged them to update any computers running these two operating systems to newer, supported versions.

As software products age, they eventually become tagged as ‘end-of-life’, hence they feature on Patch Tuesday Update. This is a natural feature of software development which occurs when the use of the software product is in decline. When any software is declared as ‘end-of-life’ it no longer receives feature support or technical support. This is a common data security issue.  More importantly, however, is that all security support such as patches, bug repair, etc are suspended. The end result is that vulnerabilities will remain within that software, making it more and more susceptible to attack.

Have you applied your patches?

Patch Tuesday (also known as Update Tuesday) is an unofficial term used to refer to when Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and others regularly releases software patches for their software products. It is widely referred to in this way by the industry. Microsoft formalized Patch Tuesday in October 2003. According to Wikipedia.