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August brought loads of drama to the Windows and Office patching scene. Microsoft’s first round of patches killed Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications and VBScript in certain situations — on all versions of Windows. Fixes for the bugs dribbled out three, four, six and 17 days after the original infection. 

Those Microsoft-introduced bugs were all the more daunting because the August patches are the ones intended to protect us from DejaBlue — the recently announced “wormable” malware infection vector that (thankfully!) has yet to be exploited. The mainstream press picked up the Chicken Little cry to install August patches right away. Then the buggy offal hit the impeller, and the press fell silent.

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If you’re using Symantec Endpoint Protection or any Norton Antivirus product on a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 machine, you didn’t get the August patches. Shortly after the August Monthly Rollup and Security-only patches were released, Microsoft put a freeze on systems running Symantec or Norton antivirus products.

The conflict stemmed from a long-anticipated change in the way Microsoft signed the August patches: Starting in August, all patches are signed using the SHA-2 encryption method. Somehow, Symantec didn’t get the message back in November that the shift was underway, and missed the deadline.

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