Patch Tuesday - October 2026

Microsoft is publishing 1,413 own-product vulnerabilities on October 2026 Patch Tuesday, including 1,102 vulnerabilities in Windows. Anyone who enjoyed last month’s record-setting Patch Tuesday will love the October 2026 edition, because it’s much bigger still. As Rapid7 has noted over the course of 2026, there is every reason to suppose that vulnerability volumes will continue to rise. Microsoft is aware of exploitation in the wild for just one of the vulnerabilities published today, as well as public disclosure for two others.Windows Shell: zero-day security feature bypassThe Windows Shell is Microsoft’s term for the GUI interaction logic for the entire OS provided by explorer.exe and associated libraries and APIs, and for the second time this year, the Windows Shell is the site of an exploited-in-the-wild zero-day vulnerability. Today’s specimen is CVE-2026-96951. Once again, the immediate prize for an attacker is a Mark of the Web (MOTW) bypass. What this means is that Windows won’t provide the user with a dialog explaining that Windows protected their PC, because in this case, it didn’t. Exploitation requires that a user opens a specially crafted malicious file or visits an a…

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