Microsoft is set to release "critical" bulletins impacting Internet Explorer and Windows next week as part of Patch Tuesday.

All totaled, Microsoft will release nine security bulletins, only two of which are "critical" and deal with remote code execution issues. The seven other bulletins are rated "important" and address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office, Windows Defender, Microsoft Server Software and Windows.

All but one of those seven bulletins deals with privilege-escalation issues, while the remaining bulletin addresses a denial-of-service vulnerability.

The latest Chrome beta just hit Google’s release channels and Chrome 27 for desktop, and mobile promises to speed up your web-browsing experience by making content appear on your screen 5 percent faster than before. Also new in this release are a new user interface for HTML5 date and time input forms, support for live audio input using the Web Audio API, some minor updates to the Chrome DevTools and a few other minor updates, such as unprefixed support for the allowfullscreen attribute for <iframe>.

Speed, of course, is something Google has always been obsessed with, and a 5 percent increase in how soon web content appears is something the Chrome team is obviously proud of. To make this possible, Google says, the scheduler is now “more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets.”

A Twitter and Flickr account associated with a North Korean news agency has been taken over by hackers claiming to be from the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Instead of pro-North Korea propaganda, the accounts are now criticizing North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un for building nuclear weapons. The hackers controlling the Twitter account also claimed to have hacked the news agency's website and other North Korean websites, which appear to be offline.

The Twitter and Flickr accounts represent Uriminzokkiri (meaning "Our Nation"), a North Korean news and propaganda site. When Uriminzokkiri established a Twitter account in 2010, the IDG News Service described the news site as "the closest thing North Korea has to an official home page" and "one of the few Web sites believed to be run from the secretive nation."

Tens of thousands of websites, some operated by The Los Angeles Times, Seagate, and other reputable companies, have recently come under the spell of "Darkleech," a mysterious exploitation toolkit that exposes visitors to potent malware attacks.

The ongoing attacks, estimated to have infected 20,000 websites in the past few weeks alone, are significant because of their success in targeting Apache, by far the Internet's most popular Web server software. Once it takes hold, Darkleech injects invisible code into webpages, which in turn surreptitiously opens a connection that exposes visitors to malicious third-party websites, researchers said.

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10), the newest version of Microsoft's longstanding Web browser, surged to 86.6% month-over-month growth in March, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. The uptick coincides with the general availability of IE10 for Windows 7, the world's most popular operating system. Redmond's latest browser, which has generally drawn praise, was initially available only for Windows 8.

Though seemingly huge, IE10's progress is less dramatic than its growth rate might suggest. IE products own nearly 45% of the PC pie, but IE10 has to date left most of that pie untouched, amassing only 2.93% of the market. In fact, IE10's market share even trails that of Windows 8, arguably the most polarizing product in Microsoft's current catalog. Given that IE10 shipped with Windows 8 and is available to millions of additional Windows 7 owners, it's noteworthy that the browser has been unable to match even Windows 8's troubled progress.