Earlier today, Microsoft released forty-two updates to address fifty-four vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, Flash, and Office software. Fourteen of the vulnerabilities are flagged as critical, and have the potential to be used for remote code execution.

This information was extracted from Microsoft’s Security Update Guide, the rather opaque reservoir into which Microsoft now dumps its update information. Of course Microsoft would be happier if we all just enabled auto-updates, and in fact the monthly patch bulletins are now little more than a link to the SUG and a recommendation to enable auto-updates.

This month’s pile of Microsoft patches includes some that help to mitigate the recently-discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and 8. Windows 10 machines received these updates last week, as soon as they were made available by Microsoft, because of course there’s no way to stop that from happening. Unfortunately for folks running some older AMD processors, the Spectre/Meltdown updates are causing Windows to crash, and Microsoft has now disabled those updates for affected computers.

It gets worse. Many antivirus products use sketchy techniques for blocking, detecting, and removing malware. Some of those activities are incompatible with this month’s Spectre/Meltdown updates for Windows. Microsoft is currently blocking those updates on computers that are missing a special registry setting: the idea is that anti-malware software will set this flag to indicate that the updates are compatible, and safe to install. On my Windows 8.1 computer, Windows Update initially did not show this month’s security-only (KB4056898) or security rollup (KB4056895) updates. That’s because (gasp) I wasn’t running any anti-malware software. To get the update, I re-enabled Windows Defender, which created the missing registry entry, and re-ran Windows Update.

There’s also a special security advisory in this month’s updates, in which Microsoft lays out the Spectre/Meltdown issue, its effect on Microsoft software, and ways to mitigate the associated vulnerabilities.

Back to our regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday…

The January 2018 update announcement as usual contains zero useful information, serving only as a pointer to the Security Update Guide. Analysis of this month’s guide data shows that there are seventy-two updates, addressing fifty-six vulnerabilities in .NET, Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Windows, Flash Player, Sharepoint, and SQL Server.

Today, Microsoft published twenty-four updates, addressing thirty-three vulnerabilities in Flash player (for Microsoft browsers), Office, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Windows.

As usual, Microsoft’s announcement is little more than a pointer to the Security Update Guide (SUG). If you’re looking for details about any of these updates, that’s your only official option. The SUG’s user interface is somewhat headache-inducing, but there’s useful information to be had there.

Windows 10 gets these updates whether you want them or not; Windows 7 and 8.1 can be configured for automatic or manual updates. I personally don’t like the idea of updates being installed on my computers at Microsoft’s whim, so I’m sticking with manual updates. And avoiding Windows 10 completely. And gradually switching to Linux.

According to Microsoft’s announcement, the November updates include patches for Internet Explorer, Edge, Windows, Office, and .NET. As usual, you have to dig into the rather awkward Security Update Guide to find additional details.

My analysis of the SUG reveals that there are fifty-three bulletins, addressing fifty-four vulnerabilities across the usual range of products. Sixteen of the vulnerabilities are flagged Critical.

If you’re interested in performing your own analysis, I strongly suggest avoiding the cumbersome SUG interface. Instead, locate the almost hidden ‘Download’ link at the top right of the updates grid and click that to open the data in Excel. From there you can use Excel’s filtering tools to wrestle the update information into more manageable lists.