Tiptoe through the bugs and get Windows and Office updated

The fourth Tuesday of the month has come and gone, and it now looks reasonably safe to patch Windows and Office. I was expecting two big releases yesterday—one to fix numerous bugs in Win10 Creators Update, version 1703; the other to plug the bugs introduced by June’s Office security patches—but neither trove appeared. Given Microsoft’s past patterns, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any more serious patches until next month’s Patch Tuesday, on Aug. 8.

There’s also a bit of additional impetus right now. On July 17, security researcher Haifei published a proof of concept for running malware scripts directly in Office apps. I haven’t seen any exploits in the wild as yet, but it would be a good idea to install KB 3213640 (Office 2007), KB 3213624 (Office 2010), KB 3213555 (Office 2013) and/or KB 3213545 (Office 2016) in the short term. (Thx to @LeaningTowardsLinux.) Note that none of these patches, as best as I can tell, correct the Office bugs introduced in June.

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