Microsoft’s streak of record-breaking vulnerability disclosures continued with a mega Patch Tuesday, containing 1,413 defects affecting the company’s various enterprise products and services. 

The monthly batch of patches surpassed the company’s previous annual record of 1,261 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in 2020. 

“Hundreds of CVEs in a single release used to be the exception — now it’s the baseline,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in an email. AI is partly to blame, he added, but it “isn’t creating these bugs out of thin air; it’s just shortening the time between a vulnerability existing and someone noticing it.”

Yet, for defenders understandably overwhelmed by the surge of defects found in Microsoft products, actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities aren’t growing in kind.

“If there’s solace to be had, it’s in the fact that only one of these bugs is under active attack,” Childs wrote in a blog post. “If you go back to the hot 0-day summer of 2023, there were 17 Microsoft 0-days between January and October as opposed to 15 this year during the same period.”

Microsoft disclosed one actively exploited zero-day affecting Windows Shell — CVE-2026-96951 — that allows unauthorized attackers to bypass a security feature. The high-severity defect is the third Windows Shell vulnerability exploited this year, according to Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable. 

“There have been 26 Windows Shell vulnerabilities patched in 2026 through October, a staggering figure compared to previous years, with only 3 Windows Shell CVEs in 2025 and just one in 2024 and 2022,” he added.

The vast majority of defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update affect Windows, its ubiquitous operating system , spanning 1,102 vulnerabilities combined. The update also included 134 vulnerabilities in Office, 61 in various developer tools and 36 in SharePoint Server. 

Microsoft tried to address the toll this monthly flood of vulnerabilities has on its customers by introducing “risk cohorts.” These groups of vulnerabilities don’t necessarily share a root cause or severity rating, but generally require a similar customer assessment that could guide prioritization efforts, the company said. 

“The volume isn’t the real story anymore,” Childs added. “What matters is that discovery is scaling faster than exploitation, so teams that triage by sheer CVE count instead of exploitability are burning cycles on the wrong bugs. Patch what’s proven, prioritized, and public, and treat everything else as this month’s new normal.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

The post Microsoft drops an actively exploited zero-day among record high of 1,413 vulnerabilities appeared first on CyberScoop.

Flock, the controversial public safety company entangled in controversy amid recurring law enforcement abuse of its products, gained authority to assign CVE IDs to vulnerabilities in its own products and grade those defects as a CVE Numbering Authority.

The manufacturer of various surveillance systems, including automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and AI-powered cameras, said it joined the global footprint of more than 550 CNAs to assess, coordinate and prioritize response to vulnerabilities internally.

“It allows us to move faster when researchers report findings, eliminate confusion from duplicate or conflicting vulnerability entries and give our customers a single, trusted source for security information about our products,” Chris Castaldo, chief information security officer at Flock, said in a statement. 

Security experts acknowledge that many vendors are granted CNA authority for good reason. Separately, Flock’s business has drawn considerable public and legal scrutiny over privacy concerns, along with multiple reports of police abusing the technology.

Controversies stemming from such misuse have impacted Flock’s credibility and could cloud how security researchers view the company as a CNA. The development also highlights the limitations of the CVE program, including what constitutes a vulnerability. 

“The measure of Flock as a CNA is whether its records give cities, police departments, and the public enough detail and accuracy to let people track specific risks by product version, the nature of the vulnerability, and ideally how to mitigate or fix it,” Katie Moussouris, founder at CEO at Luta Security, told CyberScoop.

Flock declined to answer questions or make an executive available for an interview, and instead referred back to a blog post.

The company published its vulnerability disclosure policy in August and recently created a security advisories page where it will publish all newly discovered and confirmed vulnerabilities going forward.

Zach Edwards, a security and privacy researcher, noted that numerous activists have done technical teardowns of Flock’s products and said he expects some researchers to continue disclosing Flock vulnerabilities without coordinating with the company.

Researchers last year reported multiple defects in Flock’s license-plate reader and gunshot detection system, which the company submitted for inclusion in the National Vulnerability Database, but deemed not material because the vulnerabilities require physical access to the device. 

“These cameras sit on poles on public streets,” Moussouris said.

Because CNAs are “essentially grading their own homework,” as Edwards put it, credibility and trust have to be earned consistently by properly addressing every defect that meets a reasonable threshold.

“Vendors make sense as CNAs for their own products if they can be trusted to maintain accurate records. They know the code, they can confirm the flaw, and they can tie the record to affected versions and the fix,” Moussouris said. 

“The conflict of interest manifests when they lack the organizational and technical maturity to correctly assess the flaws and their impact,” she added. “A vendor in the CNA role writes the description and often sets the severity score, so an immature vendor may inaccurately represent an issue, either through ignorance or in a misdirected effort to downplay it.”

Flock’s vulnerability disclosure policy specifically disallows testing against live customer deployments, accessing law enforcement or investigative data, physical attacks, denial-of-service testing or social engineering. The company does not run a paid bug bounty program.

“Flock stands out as a CNA because its products track drivers’ movements, its customers are police, and its policy reserves the right to hold back publication if it decides disclosure would create a safety risk to law enforcement or the public,” Moussouris said. “The latter may lead to an abuse in their authority and control of CVEs unless they embrace a more mature customer-safety-first stance of timely, transparent, and accurate vulnerability disclosure.”

Edwards is also dubious about Flock’s position as a CNA, but adds that many vendors, including some offering similar products, are already in the program. 

There are also relatively few norms in how CNAs operate because the responsibility ultimately comes down to each participating vendor. Some companies granted CNA authority are incredibly active while others haven’t publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in their products for years.

“Only time will tell how Flock operates their CVE program and if they issue CVEs for vulnerabilities publicly disclosed,” Edwards said. “But, if their recent history is any indication, they will probably screw it up in some epic way that somehow unites people across the United States to demand CVE issuing reform.”

The post Flock can now issue CVEs for its own products. Should we trust it? appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.

The post Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities appeared first on CyberScoop.

OpenAI announced Monday  it was expanding access to its frontier models for defensive cybersecurity, detailing different defensive and red-teaming workflows and a new partner program with major cybersecurity product providers.

In a pair of blogs posted Monday, OpenAI said it was updating its Daybreak program  – which provides unreleased frontier models to private organizations and governments for defensive cybersecurity work – and introducing a new model variant.

Daybreak Blue, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6-Sol, would operate with lower cybersecurity safeguards compared to other commercially available models and is described as “a recommended starting point for most defenders” that supports tasks like vulnerability discovery, secure code review, malware analysis, incident response and patch validation. 

Daybreak Red, meant for more advanced red-teaming, would provide access to a new model, dubbed GPT-5.6-Cyber, that the company said is more purpose-trained for finding vulnerabilities and testing (or exploiting) them. The model is also less likely to refuse requests around “dual-use cyber tasks.”

According to OpenAI, the organizations in Daybreak Red will have their use closely monitored and supervised, as GPT-5.6-Cyber is significantly more capable in carrying out malicious cyber tasks than Sol. A security evaluation the company devised tested both models on complex requests, including exploit chain development, authentication bypass, privilege escalation and other hacking tasks. Sol succeeded in 1.5% of the requests, while Cyber completed 95%.

OpenAI said it plans to publish a more detailed system card for GPT-5.6-Cyber at a later date.

“Models running with reduced safeguards carry risks beyond standard model usage, whether from misuse or misalignment,” the company said in a blog. “Despite these risks, we believe that democratizing access to frontier intelligence for defenders is crucial to accelerating and automating cyber defense.”

Additionally, OpenAI announced a partnership program with 16 major cybersecurity providers, saying organizations could access their models through their existing security services. The partners include IBM, CrowdStrike, Accenture, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Cloudflare, Sophos and others. 

“These partners bring deep security expertise and established relationships with organizations around the world,” OpenAI said in its blog. “By bringing our frontier cyber models into their services, we can help more defenders find serious vulnerabilities, validate which ones matter, and fix them faster.”

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and others are trying to rebalance their priorities after a string of AI-agent sandbox escapes have rattled policymakers and caused some cybersecurity experts to question if AI companies are doing enough to properly isolate the models from the internet during testing. Last week, OpenAI said it was intentionally slowing down development of its newer “Astra” model in order to develop better guardrails to restrain its behavior.

Cybersecurity and AI experts have told CyberScoop that while AI systems have greatly improved at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in software code, they still require substantial human guidance and supporting infrastructure to operate as intended.

Additionally, some research has shown that without such guidance, even near-frontier models can struggle to fully patch a discovered vulnerability or avoid introducing new bugs with their fixes.

The post OpenAI says Daybreak will expand to offer specialized cyber services  appeared first on CyberScoop.

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security program reached an unrivaled pinnacle this month, as the vendor addressed 622 vulnerabilities across its suite of business products and systems. 

“The bug apocalypse has finally descended upon us,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“The mother of all releases. To call this record-breaking is an understatement,” he added. “The CVE count year-to-date exceeds all other years’ totals.”

The startling increase in vulnerabilities reflects a compounding effect taking root across software as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in discovering and developing patches for defects lurking in error-riddled applications. 

Microsoft’s June Patch Tuesday update broke the previous all-time record with 206 vulnerabilities.

The company last week warned forewarned customers and defenders that a flood of defects would be uncovered as it applies its multi-model agentic scanning harness (MDASH) to discover and address vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale.

The monthly exponential rise in Microsoft vulnerabilities already puts the vendor on pace to break a full-year record, ending 2026 with the largest annual collection of defects, beating the previous record of 1,245 CVEs in 2020, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s probable that we will not only exceed 2,000 CVEs in a calendar year, but potentially over 3,000 CVEs this year or more,” he added.

“The volume is striking, but it reflects how good these tools have become at finding bugs, not how many of those bugs actually pose a risk to organizations,” Narang said.

Microsoft disclosed two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-56155 and CVE-2026-56164, privilege escalation defects in Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft SharePoint Server, respectively. 

The monthly batch of patches included 416 defects in Windows, 82 in Office and 46 in Microsoft Edge. More than 1 in 10 vulnerabilities the vendor disclosed — 63 total — were rated as critical.

“The products covered this month are also astonishing,” Childs said. “Just about everything you’ve ever heard of is getting patched.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

SAP also addressed a fresh assortment of vulnerabilities Tuesday, including critical defects CVE-2026-44747 in SAP NetWeaver Application Server and CVE-2026-27690 in SAP Approuter.

The post Microsoft discloses ‘the mother of all’ vulnerability loads, tripling June’s previous record appeared first on CyberScoop.