Patches, get yer patches here!

It's that time of the month again folks: patch Tuesday! System admins everywhere will rejoice as Microsoft smiles, waves to the crowd and tosses out hand-fulls of patches from their bag of tricks. This months' batch includes six critical security bulletins for Windows, four for office (also critical) and one moderate bulletin for the .NET framework. There were a lot of vulnerabilities announced this past week (including loopholes in popular apps like Internet Explorer and PowerPoint), so administrators will want to mark October 10th on their calendars, run a full back-up the night before and set the alarm clock for 10 am.

For more on this month's patch Tuesday:
- see the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog entry