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The November passel of patches didn’t include anything earth-shattering; there were no emergency security breaches storming the gates, but good patching hygiene dictates that you get your machine braced for the next round.

If you install patches manually one by one (“Group B,” which I don’t recommend for mere mortals), you need to make sure you have the proper Servicing Stack Updates in place. They’ve all changed in the past month.

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Although we’ve been promised no “C” or “D” week second cumulative updates for the rest of the year — at least for Windows — Microsoft has acknowledged a bug it created in last week’s Patch Tuesday Office patches, and now promises that it’ll update the bad fixes on most machines this week or next. Those are “C” week and “D” week, respectively.

The cause du jour: a bug in all of this month’s Office security patches that throws an error in Access saying, “Query xxxx is corrupt,” when in fact the query in question is just fine. Microsoft describes the erroneous error message on its Office Support site:

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For those of you who haven’t patched since May, there’s exceedingly bad news on the horizon. Per Catalin Cimpanu at ZDNet, Metasploit’s working-but-just-barely BlueKeep exploit is about to get a significant bug fix. That’ll put BlueKeep infection capabilities in the hands of mere mortals. The script kiddies won’t be far behind.

If you’re using — or you know someone who’s using — Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Server 2003, Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2, get patched now. The fix is easy. Even  Aunt Martha can handle it.

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