Microsoft took a break from tradition this week when it announced that it was going to delay its monthly tranche of Patch Tuesday updates. At that time, the company said that it had made this decision due to a “last minute issue.” It later added that the updates which would have been released as part of this Patch Tuesday have now been put on hold until the next Patch Tuesday release next month. However, it has had to push a critical security update for Flash on Windows nonetheless.
The critical security update for Flash on Windows 10 arrived unexpectedly earlier today. It has been released for Adobe Flash Player across multiple versions of Windows and addresses an issue that has been assigned a “critical” security rating. Clearly, Microsoft had to make a call on this and it decided that this security issue was important enough to release a separate fix for and not keep users unprotected until the next wave of Patch Tuesday updates.
The security bulletin on Microsoft TechNet explains that this update “resolves vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player when installed on all supported editions of Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows RT 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016”.
Microsoft has confirmed that this month’s Patch Tuesday updates will be included in next month’s release which is due March 14th.