Windows administrators are busy this week analyzing Microsoft"s most recent Patch Tuesday releases. Of the eight patches released on Oct. 11, at least four of them have already resulted in publicly available exploit code. FrSIRT has three of the exploits and is sure to get the others as they become known.

Although there are several critical vulnerabilities in the Patch Tuesday grouping, the consensus among several observers is that MS05-051 (MSDTC and COM+ vulnerabilities) is the most critical of the bunch. MS05-051 contains several fixes. The COM+ hole, in particular, would allow an exploit to execute malicious code remotely on previously fully patched Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 computers. MS05-052 is a cumulative patch update for Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.x and deserves special consideration as well. No word on whether these vulnerabilities affect Windows Vista and IE 7.

I"ve been beta testing Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 this week. Both are still really rough betas, but have enough features and functionality for any user to get the gist of what they can do. One of the biggest new features of Windows Vista is its UAP (User Account Protection), and it"s a great and welcome change.

The UAP addition means that by default, even if you are logged in as Administrator, most programs, including Internet browsers, will run in non-admin mode. To run a program in admin mode, the user must right-click the program icon or executable and choose to Run Elevated (Run Elevated replaces the RunAs syntax).

There are many other new Vista security features, but I don"t want to report on them until I know they are going to be included in the final release.