Oracle has been under increasing pressure in recent months to finally fix the myriad of security flaws that have plagued Java. In an unexpected emergency out-of-band patch released Friday afternoon, Oracle has responded definitively to critics with a massive security patch fixing at least 50 different issues.
The February 2013 Critical Patch Update for Java SE was originally scheduled for February 19th, but given that at least one of the vulnerabilities is being actively exploited, Oracle decided to expedite the patch update.