Microsoft to issue five patches, Apple sorts out Java

Microsoft will roll out five fixes for Patch Tuesday next week, fixing critical vulnerabilities in different versions of Windows.

In its advisory ahead of the patch rollout, Microsoft said that the updates would fix remote execution flaws in versions of Windows XP, 2000, Vista and Servers 2003 and 2008. These vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to run code on a targeted machine.

It won't fix a recent problem over Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) server, which would likely be fixed in a future out-of-band update, or the next Patch Tuesday.

"Of the five critical patches, two will require mandatory restarts causing some level of disruption within the enterprise," said Andrew Clarke, vice president of security firm Lumension, in a statement.

Apple also released a new version of Java for Mac OS X, to fix multiple flaws that also could have led to remote execution attacks.