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Microsoft is planning another busy Patch Tuesday this month - with nine bulletins that tackle a total of 13 vulnerabilities ready for delivery next Tuesday (14 September).

Four of the bulletins cover critical flaws in Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Vista. Extra security protection means that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 dodge the bullet on three of these vulns and are only grazed by the fourth, which is rated as an "important" and not a critical security update on these systems.

As usual, Microsoft's pre-alert announcement contains few clues on the specifics of what to expect next week but this hasn't gotten in the way of informed speculation by sections of the security community.

"I expect some of the bulletins to address DLL Hijacking issues in Microsoft's own products, but it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will change its guidance for Hotfix KB2264107," said Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of vulnerability scanning firm Qualys. "Currently it is only at the advisory level and users have to make an active decision to get protection against DLL Hijacking in 3rd party applications.

"As last month, Windows XP SP2 users do not have any patches supplied to them, even though the majority of updates for XP SP3 most likely apply to their discontinued version of the OS as well."

Last month Microsoft released 15 bulletins - nine covering critical flaws - in its heaviest ever Patch Tuesday security update batch. In total, these updates addressed 35 individual vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and Internet Explorer. ®

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