Microsoft's security bulletin summary indicated that the Flash patches are designed to address remote code execution vulnerabilities for some currently supported Windows systems. That switch is supposed to happen sometime this month.

Microsoft eventually plans to replace its summary announcements with a new Security Updates Guide portal.The bulletin ID numbering scheme also will get dropped.

In addition, there's a security bulletin summary available for MS17-005 describing the Flash patches. The Microsoft Security Response Center offered a tersely worded announcement today about the availability of the Flash patches. No clue was offered about Microsoft's change of course. Microsoft has regularly been distributing Flash security patches, like clockwork, ever since it started the practice with Windows 8. To ensure security, they may have considered blocking Flash for a month, for instance. Flash is considered to be a flagrant security target, so the deferral perhaps became awkward for some organizations. The failure to release was the first such patch delay in nearly 10 years, but the deferral also meant that Microsoft was putting off its Adobe Flash Player fixes. However, those February security updates were deferred till March, possibly because Microsoft had some kind of backend technical glitch happening.

Typically, Microsoft would have released these security updates last week with its general 'update Tuesday' bundle. In a surprise move, Microsoft on Tuesday released security updates to the Adobe Flash Player that's integrated with Windows systems.

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