Microsoft's recent buggy security patch (KB3097877) has been fixed

Kareem Anderson

Earlier this week, Microsoft pushed several security patches through its Patch Tuesday update to Windows. Unfortunately, there was a bad apple in the bunch and Windows users (primarily those on Windows 7) quickly began complaining about the updates affecting their use of Outlook, and causing random system crashes.
At the time, it has been suspected that update KB3097877 was the culprit behind the issues Windows users were running into. A spokesperson spoke with ZDNet recently, confirming that security patch KB3097877 would be re-issued and should address issues with Outlook for users.
As the comments, complaints, and how-to-fix-it answers continued to roll in during the rest of the week, it has now become a bit clearer that the bug was affecting a majority of Windows 7 users. Microsoft’s official word regarding the re-issuing of the KB3097877 patch is:

“We recommend customers apply this update to help stay protected.”

KB3097877 is intended to patch flaws that allow attacks to be remotely executed on code by exploiting the way Windows handles display fonts. The re-issued update began rolling out yesterday, and we’ll keep you posted to see if it fixes the issues it caused earlier this week.