No fix for Office zero day in pending Patch Tuesday

Microsoft is preparing eight patches – three of them are deemed "critical" and five "important" – for next week's upcoming Nov. 12 Patch Tuesday, but an update to a recently discovered zero-day vulnerability is not one of them.

The bulletins listed in Microsoft's advanced notification as critical are for remote code execution vulnerabilities in Windows operating system – the first flaw additionally affects web browser Internet Explorer.

The remaining vulnerabilities listed as important are said to be remote code execution, elevation of privilege, information disclosure and denial of service flaws affecting Windows operating system, as well as Microsoft Office.

“Bulletin 2 affects all supported Windows versions and requires a restart, so it's definitely a common and loaded component,” Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering at Rapid7, told SCMagazine.com in a Thursday email statement.

According to Tommy Chin, a technical support engineer at CORE Security, the bugs reported in bulletin five of the updates affect Windows 8 x64 and Windows Server 2012, which gives administrator access to an attacker.

“Bulletin 8 is also pretty nasty, as it affects all major Windows operating systems with a DOS attack," Chin wrote in a prepared statement emailed to SCMagazine.com on Thursday. "If uptime is of concern, patch this one quickly before production environments are taken offline.”

Although a Fix It has been issued, a zero-day vulnerability discovered earlier this week to be affecting Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 – as well as versions of Windows and Microsoft Lync – will not be addressed on Patch Tuesday, according to a release.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com