It’s the second Tuesday in March, which means that it’s also the third Patch Tuesday of 2013. Microsoft released seven new security bulletins today, with four rated as “critical,” but security experts are particularly concerned about a flaw rated as merely “important” that exposes your Windows PCs to major risk.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, notes in a blog post that the number of security bulletins is about par for the course for Microsoft. He adds, “In technical terms though we are seeing some interesting vulnerabilities that definitely rate higher-than-average.”

For starters, there is a cumulative security update for Internet Explorer (MS13-021). It addresses nine separate vulnerabilities, one of which has had exploit code circulating in the wild for the past month. Kandek urges IT admins to apply this update as soon as possible.

“Every supported version of Internet Explorer (6 through 10) is affected, thus implicitly making all supported Windows platforms (including Windows RT) a target for attackers,” points out BeyondTrust CTO Marc Maiffret.

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