It's Patch Tuesday next week, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has apparently put together a whopping 16 new security vulnerabilities that address a total of 49 vulnerabilities for the month of October. Featuring the largest numbers of bulletins from Microsoft ever, four of these vulnerabilities are tagged "Critical," 10 rated as "Important" and the last two as "Moderate." (The previous record was 34 security flaws in August).

Affected operating systems range from Windows XP, to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, with a restart necessary for bulletins classified as critical and important. In addition, the Mac versions of Office--Office 2004 and Office 2008 are also affected. You can check out the advance notification for a more detailed summary.

Combined with the out-of-band bulletin by Microsoft last week and Adobe's (NASDAQ: ADBE) bumper patch resolving 23 holes in Reader and Acrobat, it does look like administrators will have their hands full next week, observed Jason Miller, data and security team leader at Shavlik Technologies. As such, it would probably be a good idea to finish the deploying of any other patches prior to Tuesday.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at CNET News

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