Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Smashes Record For Biggest Ever Patch Tuesday Update (computerweekly.com) 51

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ComputerWeekly: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative, said: "We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cyber security. June's record-shattering drop ... is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale. The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018. It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist."

And with the addition of hundreds of CVEs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and other third-party flaws taking the total to almost 600, Chris Goettl, vice president of security product management at Ivanti, said talk of a 'Patch Apocalypse' was no longer unwarranted. "We are in the Patch Apocalypse. The Patch Apocalypse is now," said Goettl. "This is not intended to be a scare tactic. It is meant to outline the challenge that many organizations were anticipating, but the new generation of LLMs [Large Language Models] has accelerated significantly in the first half of 2026."

"There are going to be more CVEs resolved by vendors at a faster and more continuous pace than we have ever seen previously. Unfortunately, this will also include more zero-day and n-day exploits than previously seen as well. The window from release from a vendor to exploitation had already shortened to five days as of 2023 threat intelligence data." Goettl said that many suppliers have acknowledged the need to use AI tools in their security research to identify and resolve flaws, with Oracle, Google Chrome and Mozilla all upping the cadence of their updates. Whether or not Microsoft follows suit remains to be seen.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Microsoft Smashes Record For Biggest Ever Patch Tuesday Update

Comments Filter:
  • by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @11:18AM (#66184272)
    GitHub commits up x14 or something like that...AI is accelerating development and we'll only slow down if we have a consequent emergency.

    ...but more to the point AI is helping find and fix more bugs and security issues than ever before. This is a good thing.
    • Microsoft did not share the specific tools they are using (and no single tool is great at everything), but it seems likely Anthropic's Mythos was among the tools used at least by some of the teams for some of the code base. Microsoft already offers the Mythos model on their Azure platform to Project Glasswing member organizations.
    • This is the bugs that got reported... how many did a group of black hats or whoever keep from being reported for their own use?

      You can keep finding bugs and fixing them, and eventually you end up with an OS that's walled itself off from everything.

  • "AI is (...) at an uncontrollable scale."

    Well, that's comforting.

    • Oh it's controllable. I'll bet there are big levers on electrical panels somewhere in the data center to open the main input circuits.

      Barring that, there are plenty of manual ways of cutting electrical cables - anything from bolt cutters to backhoes.

  • According to co-workers, the latest patch bundle has caused some problems. Patches are curated, but apparently some issues got through. I've put off updates until tonight. Tomorrow may not be very productive.

    • No surprise. Count me among "and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist." No shit, Dick Tracy!
    • Meanwhile, I'll continue blasting along using macOS and Debian.

      • For me it's MacOS and Mint, but I have a Winders machine assigned to me on which I am forced to do development for a job.

        In fairness, MacOS updates have caused problems. Although, not anywhere nearly as frequently.

      • I imagine I'll get those updates on my Windows "workstation" I boot up once a month for corporate spyware scans then turn back off. My real machine is NetBSD 10.1 and IRIX 6.5.30 on my desktop O2.
    • According to co-workers, the latest patch bundle has caused some problems.

      It is not uncommon that the patch Tuesday updates results in some problems in some environments and on some machines, even those size of those updates seem smaller.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    That there will be a massive amount of patches for a few months to clean up old software. Then patch tuesdays get real small as everything previously deployed has been patched. At the same time new software gets fixed before shipping using the same Mythos type AIs?

    Maybe newer, better versions of Mythos finds more problems in the old stuff.

    The real trouble is older stuff in production that's no longer supported. ie Windows versions older than10.

    And will purposeful backdoors get closed. Is Mythos programmed t

  • Kinda sad that all this patching does not clearly make the situation any better, there will still be more patching.

  • by Aviation Pete ( 252403 ) on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @12:27PM (#66184412)

    It is deeply embarassing that Microsoft needs produce so many patches in a single month.

    But consistent with past behavior (it's not a bug, it's a feature!), Microsoft is again twisting the truth.

    • Would you rather they leave shit unpatched? Or are you a time traveler who can go prevent them from releasing software that is already released?

      Not sure what your point is, other than just piling on. It's really hard to get the creamer out of the coffee once it's in there.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      But consistent with past behavior (it's not a bug, it's a feature!), Microsoft is again twisting the truth.

      To be fair, it works. We even get complete nil wits here that cheer for them, even when their sheer incapability is on display like never.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      We have seen a fair few critical bugs in Linux lately, and doubtless there are many we don't know about but which people using Mythos and the like have already found. You can bet that the NSA has a long list, for example.

  • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @12:30PM (#66184416)

    I was able to implement a single patch that removed all those vulnerabilities. I patched my computer to run Linux.

    • Re:single patch (Score:4, Informative)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn&earthlink,net> on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @12:44PM (#66184444)

      Well, and FWIW, there has been a huge increase in the number of
      "security fixes" Debian has been downloading recently. I assume the same is true of other Linux distros and probably for Apple, though I don't think those are made public. Perhaps the BSDs haven't seen a large uptick.

      • I'm retired, so I have time to download and install any patches on my Fedora box while I'm making breakfast every morning. Generally speaking, there's a new kernel available every week or two, but recently there were two in the same week. I guess that the kernel devs don't think that a monthly patch schedule is adequate to keep Linux safe.
      • BSD guy here, I can confirm FreeBSD has. They are delaying 15.1 by a week to complete their last merge and update. Anthropic dropped a RCE on them for NFSd issues about a month ago (CVE-2026-4747), but that's been about the size of it. Nothing for OpenBSD, AFAIK. NetBSD proactively banned AI-generated code in commits around 2024 (updated guidelines treat LLM output like ChatGPT/Copilot as "tainted" due to copyright/licensing risks and quality concerns).

        Comparatively, BSD is faring better than Linux and s
  • They indeed have much patching to do.
  • If you haven't already, figure out how you'll expedite your patching cycle. AI tools capable of exploit detection are also going to allow bad actors to reverse engineer patches and work out what the vulnerability was in the first place (and, presumably, use AI to then write the code to exploit it).

    "Eh, we'll patch it within 30 days before the details of the CVE are released" is probably no longer good enough,

  • And that this is just 1 month of fixes !
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      With the mess their code-base is, I consider it quite possible that they can now only increase the number of problems. Maybe LLMs will be what finally puts Microsoft on the trash-heap of tech history. Obviously, LLMs only find a small faction of the vulnerabilities in code, but they may find enough in MS code to just keep going and going.

Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

Working...