This December, Microsoft will not be providing any optional updates. According to the software giant, they will only focus on security updates this holiday season, according to BleepingComputer.
This only means that Windows 10 as well as all supported versions of Windows 11, including Server versions, and even Windows 8, will not be getting any additional updates this month.
No Additional Optional Updates Will be Provided Until 2022 Ends, Microsoft Says
The software giant already released its Patch Tuesday update for December. Therefore, as Christmas and New Year approaches, the company wants to emphasize that no additional optional updates will be provided until 2022 ends.
Based on Microsoft's updates and announcement, the company will be having a little holiday break, according to MS Power Use.
However, despite the lack of optional updates, the company will continue to provide necessary security updates.
Last Tuesday, Microsoft released security fixes. For those unfamiliar, the tech giant releases Patch Tuesday as part of its monthly security rollup.
According to Microsoft, there won't be a non-security preview release for December 2022 as there would be minimal operations during the holidays, as well as in the upcoming Western New Year.
The company added that it will resume the normal monthly servicing for both B and C releases in January 2023.
According to Microsoft, updates would resume in January, thus, we should not expect significant bug fixes in the Patch Tuesday update next month.
The company added that this is because Patch Tuesday already includes security fixes together with fixes from the previous optional updates.
According to BleepingComputer, it's better to avoid optional updates if you can as it generally messes up the operating system.
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Microsoft Released Patch Tuesday Earlier This Month
Earlier this month, Microsoft released the Patch Tuesday for December 2022. The patch comes with fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities, including an actively exploited bug, plus a total of 49 flaws.
As per a separate report of BleepingComputer, six of the 49 vulnerabilities in the latest Patch Tuesday are classified as critical because they allow remote code execution, which is one of the most severe types of vulnerabilities.
The following are the number of bugs in each vulnerability category:
- 19 Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities
- 2 Security Feature Bypass Vulnerabilities
- 23 Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
- 3 Information Disclosure Vulnerabilities
- 3 Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
- 1 Spoofing Vulnerability
Meanwhile, one of the two zero-day vulnerabilities that Patch Tuesday can fix is actively exploited. The other one is publicly disclosed.
The software giant classifies a vulnerability as a zero-day if it is publicly disclosed or actively exploited and comes with no official fix.
The actively exploited and publicly disclosed vulnerability is the CVE-2022-44698 or the Windows SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability, which was discovered by Will Dormann.
The other publicly disclosed vulnerability is the CVE-2022-44710 or the DirectX Graphics Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability, which was discovered by Luka Pribanić.
With this vulnerability, successful exploitation requires an attacker to win a race condition. When an attacker successfully exploited this vulnerability, he could gain SYSTEM privileges.
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