While four of the six security bulletins that Microsoft issued for April's Patch Tuesday release are rated "critical," one in particular has already been targeted by an attack lurking in the wild.

Four of the six security bulletins Microsoft will release on next week's Patch Tuesday are rated "critical" and will address vulnerabilities in everything from Windows 7 and Office 2010 to the .NET framework and Internet Explorer 9.

In what has been called "a flashback of the bad old Patch Tuesdays," Microsoft Tuesday released its six security bulletins for the month of March.

The Valentine's Day 2012 edition of Patch Tuesday is upon us, and Microsoft has come forward with details on the nine bulletins it previewed last week.

Microsoft Thursday said that the second Patch Tuesday of 2012 will see nine security bulletins, four of which were deemed critical.

Seven bulletins, one deemed critical, and a handful of new Microsoft security issues all arrived today as part of Microsoft's first Patch Tuesday of 2012. 

It's a busy day for IT administrators and information security professionals. Not only is today Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for the month of April, it is also the day of Adobe's quarterly security updates. In total, there are 40 vulnerabilities being addressed today--many of them rated as critical and exposing systems to potential remote exploits.

Microsoft and Adobe Tuesday separately delivered a raft of security updates that address vulnerabilities said to impact common user activities such as watching video files or opening PDFs.

It was a notable accomplishment when Windows 7 was not impacted in any way by the vulnerabilities addressed in the six Security Bulletins released by Microsoft for the November Patch Tuesday. It would be even more impressive if Windows 7 proved invulnerable to the zero-day exploit that hit the next day.

Yesterday was Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for the month of November. There are 6 new Security Bulletins this month: 3 rated as Critical and 3 rated as Important. Not all Critical Security Bulletins are created equally though. You need to understand the implications of the flaw being patched and how it applies to your systems to determine how urgent the update is.