It doesn’t break the record for most vulnerabilities patched, or even the most security bulletins in a single Patch Tuesday, but Microsoft comes pretty close. For the February 2013 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has a whopping 12 security bulletins, which fix a mind-numbing 57 separate flaws.

Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, says, “It’s going to be a rough Valentine’s Day for many IT admins this month. With ongoing issues with Java and 12 bulletins from Microsoft, including 5 critical issues and many restarts, it’s going to be a very disruptive Patch Tuesday.”

Senior Manager of Security Engineering, Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering for Rapid7, on the other hand, tries to stay positive. “On the plus side, none of the issues patched this month are known to be actively being exploited “in the wild”.”

That is definitely good news, but IT admins still have their work cut out for them. Henry notes, “It’s disturbing to note how many different Microsoft platforms are critically affected this month. Everything from Windows XP to the new Windows RT is critically impacted.”

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