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In the U.S., we’re quickly coming up to the start of holiday season, meaning it’s time for, well, time off. I typically add technology maintenance jobs to the monthly mix of patching and maintaining servers and workstations. This month, I’m also taking time to better understand the impact of one specific security bulletin — I honestly can’t figure out exactly what I’m supposed to do to keep my network secure. 

The good news: for most readers, none of these concerns apply to you. I’m ready to give the all-clear to go ahead and install Microsoft’s November updates on laptops, desktops and workstations — especially if you are running the Windows 10 1909 feature release. That said, do your Thanksgiving Zoom get-together first and then install any updates. I’d hate to have you see nothing but the spinning wheel of Windows updates instead of your family and friends.

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If you asked a normal user what they dislike most about Windows 10, the answer would likely be related to patching, rebooting and the generally confusing update process. Entire web sites have sections devoted to explaining the updating process and how to manage it — and I’ve written my fair share about the topic. 

In addition to writing about Microsoft patches here (and about Windows security for CSO), I’m also a moderator on the Patchmanagement.org listserve. We have many people who rely on various patching tools to deploy updates and maintain workstations.  There are a number of options, so it’s important to understand how they work (and how they vary) so you can get the most out of them.

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November’s updates held a few surprises. 

First, for those still running Office 2010 last month was supposed to be the drop-dead date for support.  No more security updates at all.  None.  Zilch.  Zippo.  

And yet, we week received updates for Excel (KB4486743), Office (KB4486737, KB4486738, KB4484534, KB4484455), and for Word (KB4486740) — all of which patch for remote code executions.  (I remember when Office 2007 had its swan song, we received updates after its end-of-life notice as well.) My guess is that these updates were probably still in testing and had not yet been completed, hence the late release. So, if you are still running Office 2010, you get one more month’s worth of updates.  I don’t expect another set next month. But then again, I didn’t expect this month’s either.

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First a bit of an introduction.  Recently, Woody Leonhard decided to take a much deserved “retirement” from both AskWoody.com and Computerworld. I put “retirement” in quotes because I find that in IT, you never really retire. You’re often called on to fix anything that has a motherboard or boots up, no matter what operating system is under the hood — especially when visiting family members and even in a pandemic.  Woody is back in Thailand on what he calls an extended vacation.

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It was yet another patch roller coaster ride this month with the usual crop of one-off bugs, a  Malwarebytes-associated assault on networking, a promised Flash killer that doesn’t — and that announced Dynamics 365 Commerce patch, CVE-2020-16943, still isn’t out. 

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