Microsoft has a long tradition of publishing Security Bulletins to share information about patches and security fixes that it releases. But starting next year this is going to change. As of February 2017, Microsoft will make use of the newly launched Security Updates Guide database.
it was a little afterthought tacked on the end of a short blog post: “Security update information will be published as bulletins and on the Security Updates Guide until January 2017. After the January 2017 Update Tuesday release, we will only publish update information to the Security Updates Guide”.
The main point of the blog point was to point out the existence of the new database, of which Microsoft says:
“This month we released a preview of our new single destination for security vulnerability information, the Security Updates Guide. Instead of publishing bulletins to describe related vulnerabilities, the new portal lets our customers view and search security vulnerability information in a single online database.”
Meanwhile Microsoft’s January 2017 Patch Tuesday Comes with 4 Security Updates and two of the four Microsoft security bulletins are rated as critical, the highest severity rating a bulletin can receive. Because of this, users should make sure they install this month’s updates as soon as possible.
The Patch Tuesday update fixes 15 unique vulnerabilities, among which 12 are inherited from Adobe Flash, and only three affect Microsoft native products. In fact, this month’s security updates are one of the smallest security bulletin Microsoft has released to date. Besides the security updates, Microsoft also released new Windows 10 cumulative updates KB3213986, KB3210720, and KB3210721, for which there are no changelogs available at the time of writing
