Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities
Microsoft addressed 974 defects across its product suite, including two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, in its monthly Patch Tuesday security program.
The massive batch of patches, Microsoft’s largest ever, reflects a continuing trend for the vendor as it leans on artificial intelligence to discover more vulnerabilities at a faster rate. Yet, the recent period of record breaking vulnerability disclosures hasn’t resulted in a flood of actively exploited zero-days.
“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery shows no signs of slowing down,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “However, we have not seen a correlating spike in active exploits — yet.”
The vulnerabilities actively exploited prior to disclosure — CVE-2026-81963 affecting the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 affecting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call — both have CVSS ratings of 7.8 and allow attackers to escalate privileges.
More than 1 in 10 defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update are rated critical. The update included 723 vulnerabilities in Windows, 111 in Office, 111 in Office 2016, 62 in SQL and 22 spanning various developer tools.
Researchers encouraged security teams and customers to not get overwhelmed by the total number of defects, but instead focus on their specific areas of risk and exposure.
“While the number of vulnerabilities being patched is rising, the number of vulnerabilities that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles,” Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email.
“It’s critical that organizations understand which vulnerabilities actually apply to them, whether they pose a threat by being reachable and exploitable, and prioritize remediation based on this risk context,” he added.
Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, drew a similar conclusion from the record-breaking Patch Tuesday.
“At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first,” he said. “With hundreds of updates landing at once, IT and security teams need to quickly separate the vulnerabilities that demand immediate action from those that can follow the normal deployment cycle.”
The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.