Microsoft's monthly patch release for July will cover seven security issues, six of which could be remotely exploited by an attacker.

The company publishes an advisory in advance of its patch date, which is the second Tuesday of the month, so administrators knows what products will be affected. It does not describe the vulnerabilities, however, until the security fixes are released.

The critical vulnerabilities are in the Windows OS, .NET Framework, Silverlight, Office, Visual Studio, Lync and Internet Explorer (IE). A seventh bulletin, ranked as "important," affects Microsoft's Windows Defender security software.

The most important bulletin addresses IE, wrote Wolfgang Kandek, CTO for Qualys. It affects IE versions six through 10 on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server 2003, Server 2008 and RT.

Microsoft will also fix a zero-day vulnerability revealed by security researcher Tavis Ormandy, Kandek wrote. The problem concerns a memory management problem that is essentially a zero-day vulnerability after an exploit was added to the Metasploit penetration testing tool, he wrote.

The company described the vulnerability, CVE-2013-3660, as a "a publicly known issue in the kernel-mode drivers component of Windows."

Kandek wrote that the patch day will be a bit of work for desktop and server administrators. "All in all, a normally sized Patch Tuesday, but with a large number of critical issues," he wrote.

The bulletins will be released at 10 a.m. Tuesday PDT.

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