In an advanced patch notification issued Thursday by Microsoft, four massive security patches have been announced. They are designed to fix security issues in Windows XP, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Office OneNote 2007, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Encoder, Windows Server 2008, Visual FoxPro, .net Framework and other Microsoft software.

The security issues to be fixed by the upcoming patches are ranked as critical, as they could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the target machine without consent from the user, and execute code remotely. A number of bugs in the aforementioned software are also addressed by the update – notably in Windows Media Encoder, IE, and Windows Server 2008.

As Microsoft, with its advance bulletins offers users and security experts only a general overview of Tuesday’s monthly patches on the Thursday before, the precise details of which bugs and security holes are to be patched for each specific program are not yet available. Exact information will be available at approx. 1 p.m. EDT on September 9, when the patches will be released.

This month’s patches are far fewer than last month’s almost a dozen updates, of which 6 were critical and 5 tagged as important. Nevertheless, this month’s four bulletins are a significant amount of patches.

Aside from the security patches, next Tuesday also marks the release of several non-security patches which include stability updates for Vista, and a patch for Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service, which is a virtual machine backup tool.

Further information available at the Microsoft website.