Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will ship a total of eight security bulletins to address 23 vulnerabilities in October's Patch Tuesday next week, of which two are rated as "critical" with the remaining six pegged as "important."

According to the advance notification released by Microsoft, affected software includes all recent versions of the Internet Explorer browser including IE 9, .NET Framework and Silverlight 4, Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010, all versions of Microsoft Host Integration Server and core components of the Windows operating system, including Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008--though not those installed with the Server Core installation option.

While the number of security bulletins is hardly chart-topping this round, the vulnerabilities found in some enterprise-centric software--Internet-facing Forefront UAG especially--means that affected businesses need to work to ensure affected systems are quickly tested and patched. In addition, some amount of disruption can be expected, given that almost all of the patches require a system restart.

As reported on eWeek, Microsoft is also expected to release an updated version of its Malicious Software Removal Tool on Tuesday to eliminate an error that caused its security products to wrongly identify the Chrome browser as malware. This resulted in some frustration earlier in the week when Microsoft Security Essentials erased Chrome for up to 3,000 users before the problem was identified and halted.

For more:
- check out this article at ZDNet
- check out this article at eWeek

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