As part of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, the Windows developer will be pushing out a total of seven updates for Internet Explorer, Silverlight, and Office. Four of the patches are marked "critical", which means that they allow an attacker to run malware on the PC just by the person visiting a web site.

One of the critical patches is destined to fix a security hole present in Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 10 across XP to Windows 8. The critical Office patch is an interesting one. Woflgang Kandek, CTO at security firm Qualys notes:

It is puzzling to see such a high rating for this software that typically requires opening of an infected file in order for the attack to work. It will be interesting to see the attack vector for this vulnerability that warrants the 'critical' rating.

Like with all security updates, we recommend that you install these updates as soon as Microsoft makes them available.