Patch Tuesday updates can cause boot issues on PCs with Sophos

Besides the system restore bug, this month's Patch Tuesday updates are also causing issues with Sophos anti-virus. The security firm issued a warning to its customers that the KB4499164 and KB4499165 updates can cause boot issues, and urged clients to deinstall these critical security patches. Sophos says these issues only occur on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 systems, other versions of Windows do not seem to cause issues.

As The Register points out, this is pretty remarkable advice from Sophos as this leaves the computers of Sophos clients wide open to attacks, possibly of a WannaCry-style worm:

Its advice on what to do is pretty blunt: uninstall the Windows update. Specifically, revert KB4499164 (May's full-fat Patch Tuesday) and KB4499165, the security-only update. As regular readers know, the latest Patch Tuesday is intended to mitigate a pretty nasty vuln (CVE-2019-0708) which permits unauthenticated remote code execution through the medium of Remote Desktop Services. Sophos itself opined that it was "so serious that Microsoft has even released patches for its long-unsupported operating systems, Windows 2003 and XP".