If yours is one of many businesses which depend upon Microsoft Security Bulletins to remain informed about new patches and fixes to known vulnerabilities, you and your colleagues should prepare yourselves for an upcoming change in the way Microsoft announces security fixes.
In blog post in late 2016, Microsoft confirmed that its Security Bulletins would be coming to an end in January 2017. Starting in February 2017, any patches and security fixes will be made available on the Microsoft Security Updates Guide database.
Fortunately, this change should not have a significant impact on users, given that the update information is still being made available to them. Nonetheless, the entirety of the information that had earlier been released through Microsoft Security Bulletins has been moved to a solitary database, which in theory should make it more simple to look for the information that users require.
The majority of security specialists are truthfully only interested in viewing the most recent security updates, therefore assuming that that information is readily available, there should not be any difficulty.
The decision was taken following requests from Microsoft customers to be be able to access update information more easily. Microsoft have indicated that customers requested simpler methods of customizing their view in order to fulfil a diverse set of needs.
It will be possible to view and sort information according to its release date, product type, KB number, or CVE. Security professionals will also be able to customize the view so as to omit information concerning products that are irrelevant to their requirements.
Furthermore, Microsoft clarified that a new RESTful API will now enable its users to find information concerning Microsoft Security updates. According to a spokesperson, this will eliminate the need for users to employ outdated methods such as screen-scraping of security bulletin web pages to put together working databases of information.
All in all, this promises to be a positive move that will make information much easier to find and access. But then again, Windows 10 was expected to solve a lot of issues.
