Microsoft releases emergency security patches

Software giant Microsoft will release two emergency security patches later today that will fix vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer and Visual Studio developer programs that allows users to use malware programs remotely.

The release of the patches will be the third time Microsoft has released security fixes outside of its regular schedule in the past 25 months, indicating they are of a crucial nature.

The company gave advance notice of the fixes last Friday, and said the Internet Explorer patch is rated as “critical”, the highest security level, with the Visual Studio warning rated as “important”.

“While this release is to address a single, overall issue, in order to provide the broadest protections possible to customers, we’ll be releasing two separate security bulletins,” a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement.

“While we can’t go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications. The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin. The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as ‘critical’ that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported.”