Why So Many Patches?

Regular readers will know that Microsoft publishes their updates on the second Tuesday of each month. (So if your computer is slow a few days after that date it is probably ingesting its monthly update!) In prior years, the number of fixes each month averaged around 100. That sounds like a lot – and it is – but it’s nothing compared to the last few months. Beginning this spring, an upward trend emerged only to skyrocket in a few month ago. September’s Patch Tuesday included a whopping 974 individual fixes! Is this a sign of Microsoft’s shoddy coding or weak security practices? Actually, far from it. We can credit artificial intelligence tools with the large spike. Big companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe are using A.I. to find previously-unknown flaws in their products. The idea, or at least the hope, is that they are identifying and fixing these vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. It’s definitely an arms race of a sort, and we hope that the good guys can stay ahead of the curve. And for all the regular users out there, let’s hope the number of patches can settle down after a while.