Six of the worst for December’s Patch Tuesday

There’s no relief for IT departments this Christmas, with Microsoft set to release a six-pack of fixes on this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Three of the December patches are rated as critical, Microsoft’s highest state of alert, while the remaining three are categorised as important.

All deal with potential remote code execution, apart from one that closes a denial of service exploit in Windows.

Older versions of Microsoft Office (XP and 2003) are targets for one of the exploits, and Microsoft Works 8.5 makes a rare appearance on the affected software list for the same problem.

Windows 7 is largely exempt from the five Windows patches, except for one that closes a hole in Internet Explorer 8, the new operating system’s default browser.

Microsoft will be hoping that December’s Patch Tuesday passes with less fuss than November’s fixes, which were falsely accused of triggering a Black Screen of Death error by a British security firm.