Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is set to fix a bumper crop of 64 vulnerabilities as part of April's Patch Tuesday updates next week. Besting the previous record of 49 vulnerabilities in October 2010, the security fixes are packaged in 17 bulletins and affects the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and GDI+. Nine of these fixes were flagged as "critical," with another eight deemed to be "important."

The sheer number of updates, coupled with the fact that all 17 of the updates may require system restarts effectively means that system administrators and IT managers should expect to be busy next week. Moreover, it is not advisable that businesses take their time with the updates either, given that all but two of the bulletins allow for the possibility of remote code execution.

As blogged by Amol Sarwate, who is a Manager for the Vulnerability Research Lab at Qualys, "This is a huge update and system administrators should plan for deployment as all windows systems including Server 2008 and Windows 7 are affected by critical bulletins." In the meantime, you can read about Microsoft's advance notification here for additional details.

For more on this story: 
- check out this article at Computereworld
- check out this article at Redmond Mag
- check out this article at eSecurityPlanet
- check out this article at CRN

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