This Week in Security: It’s Patch Tuesday Again

Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking numbers of security fixes. The August 2026 patch set actually …. This Week in Security: It’s Patch Tuesday Again, TVs Spying, Supply Chain Worms Return, Prolonged Hack Impacts, Stolen IDs.

Was this a sign of the bug apocalypse lessening. Brian Krebs at Krebs On Security once again brings his excellent roundup of Patch Tuesday events, with this months patch set absolutely crushing previous numbers with nearly 1,000 security fixes. Two of the fixes are for zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in the wild, both allowing privilege escalation on Windows.

Privilege escalation bugs turn general vulnerabilities in applications and games into full administrator access to gain persistence and deploy ransomware, and generally make any vulnerability significantly worse. Krebs also calls out a CVSS 9.8 (so close to a perfect 10!) vulnerability that allows remote code execution in the Windows shell with no user interaction and no authentication, a remotely exploitable DNS bug present since Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10 which will likely see exploitation in the wild soon, and over a hundred other bugs are ranked “Critical”. How the sheer volume of vulnerabilities in this patch will fit with recent Microsoft recommendations that companies should apply the patches immediately remains to be seen.