The first Patch Tuesday of 2016 has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month's release is relatively light with nine bulletins addressing 25 vulnerabilities. Six bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Edge, Internet Explorer, JScript/VBScript, Office, Silverlight, and Windows. The remaining three bulletins are rated important and address vulnerabilities in Exchange and several parts of Windows.

Bulletins Rated Critical

Microsoft bulletins MS16-001 through MS16-0006 are rated as critical in this month's release.

MS16-001 and MS16-002 are this month's Internet Explorer and Edge security bulletin respectively. In total, four vulnerabilities were addressed and unlike in previous bulletins there are no vulnerabilities that IE and Edge have in common.

• MS16-001 is the IE bulletin for IE versions 7 through 11. Two vulnerabilities are addressed with those being CVE-2016-0002, a use-after-free flaw and CVE-2016-0005, a privilege escalation flaw. Note that CVE-2016-0002 is a VBScript engine vulnerability that is addressed in this bulletin for systems with IE 8 through 11 installed. Those who use IE7 and earlier or who do not have IE install will need to install MS16-003 to patch this vulnerability.
• MS16-002 is the Edge bulletin addressing two vulnerabilities as well. Both CVE-2016-0003 and CVE-2016-0024 are memory corruption vulnerabilities that could result remote code execution if exploited.

One special note regarding this month's IE advisory: In August 2014, Microsoft announced the end-of-life for Internet Explorer versions older than IE 11 that would take effect today. As a result, this month's bulletin will be the final one for affected versions. After today, "only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates." As such, there are exceptions to the end-of-life announcement with those being Windows Vista SP2 (IE9), Windows Server 2008 SP2 (IE9), and Windows Server 2012(IE 10). For more information on the IE end-of-life, please refer to Microsoft's documentation here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE-support

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