This posting is a little later than usual due to a number of late-in-the-week updates from Microsoft last week. We started off with no publicly reported zero-days or active exploits in the wild. (As we were working with Microsoft, we felt that an out-of-bound patch was imminent that would change our advice on patch cycles for October. But it appears the final “change” for this release was a relatively minor update to Visual Studio – leading to no change in our recommendations in this benign update.)
Things to watch out for include: updates to Win32K (always a crowd-pleaser),a change to a core business application dependency (MSXML6 libraries) and potentially difficult troubleshooting scenarios in an update to Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)
We have created a useful infographic that this month looks a little lopsided, as all of the attention should be on the Windows components
Key Testing Scenarios
Working with Microsoft, we have developed a system that interrogates Microsoft updates and matches any file changes (deltas) released each month against our testing library. The result is a “hot-spot” testing matrix that drives our portfolio testing process. It generated the following testing scenarios:
