IDG Contributor Network: Why February's Patch Tuesday is delayed
Credit to Author: Greg Lambert| Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:52:00 -0800
After a short break since our Patch Tuesday Debugged analysis in January, it looks like we are going to have some delay with Patch Tuesday in February due to a last minute technical issue with the Microsoft release process.
Microsoft had previously indicated that it was going to change the update process for security-related fixes this month — and a bug discovered during this process change may have caused the delay. Chris Goettl from Ivanti, offers this: “In the hours since Microsoft announced it was going to postpone Update Tuesday I have had a number of people asking if this delay was related to Microsoft’s change to a cumulative update model. If it were just one update that was delayed I would agree, but with all updates being delayed I think it is more of a Windows Update Services infrastructure issue.” I would tend to agree.
Though at present this is pure speculation, I expect that Patch Tuesday is likely to happen next week on February 21.
This month’s update cycle from Microsoft is especially important as a now critical zero-day vulnerability (CVE867968) has been reported related to how a component of the Microsoft SMB protocol handles traffic. This was initially reported as a denial of service attack, but now looks like to be rated as critical by Microsoft as it may lead to a more serious (RCE) remote code execution scenario. Expect this update — when Microsoft delivers it — to be a “Patch Now” update for all Microsoft platforms (server and desktops).
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Watch this space for an in-depth analysis of this month’s Microsoft Update Tuesday, coming next week.
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