Today is Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2015. This months updates, released this morning, contain 9 update bundles that are plugging a whopping 55 distinct security problems in their operating system. Three of the 9 update bundles are labeled as ‘Critical’ and all are related to flaws for remote code execution, which is bad. These updates apply to Windows Vista, 7 & 8, but do not apply to XP which lost its support last April. Anyone still using XP should seriously consider upgrading to 7 or 8 for security reasons. Also, anyone still using Server 2003 should consider upgrading before Microsoft discontinues support of it in June of this year.
Microsoft updates are released on the second Tuesday of every month are critical to the security of your PC primarily because these updates are fixing recently discovered but many times are already being used by cyber criminals to infect PC’s.
These updates do require the PC to be rebooted to fully apply them, so be sure to reboot the computer in the next day or two or when you get a notification that updates have been downloaded and it prompts you for a reboot. Only takes a few minutes to do this and it will improve the security of your data and identity on the Internet.
