For Microsoft, every second Tuesday of the month is called Patch Tuesday and normally security experts and IT professionals are on full crunch mode in in order to maintain Microsoft's software integrity. The first Tuesday of 2015 is no exception and for their first patch of the year, Microsoft release a total of eight security update including one Critical update and the remaining tagged as Important.
In the past, every Patch Tuesday usually contain a fix for Internet Explorer which has been a favorite target for malicious hackers; however this latest patch from Microsoft does not include any IE fix, just an update from previous IE patch released last month. Experts were quick to notice the surprising absence of an IE patch and some even speculates that this might be due to the fact that Microsoft is planning to release IE with a new browser in its latest operating system, the Windows 10.
In general, Microsoft's first patch release for 2015 is pretty much minor; the following are the operating systems that received patches; for desktop platform, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2012.
The highlight of the day however was Microsoft's response to Google when the latters' Project Zero revealed a critical vulnerability to the formers' Telnet protocol, specifically the MS 15-004. The Telnet vulnerability was first detected by Google Project Zero and warned Microsoft about the possible consequences if it will not be fixed in due time. Google gave Microsoft a 90 day period to fix the problem before Google publish it in the public domain. The 90 day period expired and Microsoft was not able to create patch to fix the problem, therefore Google published the problem and when the vulnerability is out in the public domain several hackers can abuse it to serve their own purpose.
