Tuesday's updates will address vulnerabilities in Windows . The critical update plugs holes in editions of Windows the company still supports. The update ranked "important" will protect against spoofing bugs in Windows and Server 2000.

"Along with the spring weather, March is bringing one of the most disruptive Patch Tuesdays we've seen in a while," said Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst for Lumension. "What's interesting about this series of patches is that they affect all Windows operating systems, which are impacted by the remote code execution, implying that it could be comprised through malicious code -- something we'll have to confirm on Tuesday."

A Mammoth Undertaking

According to Henry, the critical patch is going to be a huge undertaking for IT administrators. That's because the broad platform impact of the bulletin suggests that core services -- rather than isolated application components -- of the Windows operating system need to be modified. Any patching of the core infrastructure opens up other applications to potential risk. The bottom line: A simple patch deployment is impossible this coming Patch Tuesday.

"To make sure this is secure, IT departments will have to do a scan of the entire system as well as reboot all Windows machines in the entire enterprise . When at the server software level, rebooting is a very disruptive event, making servers further exposed to vulnerabilities," Henry said.

In order for this vulnerability to be removed, he continued, IT will have to bring down the servers with the additional challenge of continuing to maintain service -level agreements. Given the breadth of this critical update, he said, all resources at Microsoft are likely engaged in getting this patch precise.

If the critical update isn't enough to keep IT administrators busy, the two important updates that also affect Windows operating systems will be. Henry said it's likely that all three patches are related. Vulnerabilities one and two have the exact same exposure, so a definite link exists between the two. (continued...)

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