Yet another botched update spotted this month

Feb 27, 2015 12:34 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft's February 2015 Patch Tuesday updates surely created plenty of issues to IT administrators and users themselves, as a number of bulletins that the company shipped this month proved to do more harm than good on a number of systems.

The last in this series is KB3023607, a patch which, according to Microsoft, disables SSL 3.0 and makes POODLE attacks ineffective against Internet Explorer users.

This patch clearly needs to be installed by users who want to remain protected while browsing the web, but it turns out that it actually breaks down Cisco's AnyConnect VPN. Right now, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are said to be the only affected versions, with the error message reading, “Failed to initialize connection subsystem.”

Microsoft has already confirmed that there are indeed some issues affecting this bulletin and has released a “Fix it” solution that corrects the problem automatically on systems suffering from the aforementioned problem.

To install the “Fix it” patch, all you need to do is download this file and simply run it to correct the problem. If you wish to disable it, do the same thing but click on the “Disable this fix” option.

In the meantime, plenty of users posting on the forums confirm that there's indeed a problem with the patch and there's no doubt that more exposure is needed to find out about the “Fix it” solution in order to correct the issues. A fix delivered via Windows Update would come in much handier, but don't expect one until next month's Patch Tuesday.

Thank you, James VZ, for the tip!