A patch is not just for Christmas...

Patching systems remains an essential part of an overall security strategy. For Windows, the easiest way to stay up-to-date is to enable Automatic Updates - you can find more information here.

Here's a summary of this year's patches:

The figures above include not only regular 'Patch Tuesday' updates, but any out-of-band updates issued by Microsoft. So far this year there has been just one such update, in October.

However, you may have seen the recent Microsoft Security Advisory (961051) relating to a vulnerability found in Internet Explorer. So far no patch has been announced for this vulnerability, but we'll let you know if that changes.

You'll see that the numbers have remained relatively consistent over the last three years. You can find the 2006 chart here and the 2007 chart here.

Here's a summary of the totals for the last three years: