#patch-tuesday

#patch-tuesday

Each month, the team at Readiness analyzes the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance. The company's Patch Tuesday release for February addresses 59 CVEs across the company's product family - roughly half the volume of January's 159 patches. Six vulnerabilities, affecting Windows Shell, MSHTML, Desktop Window Manager, Remote Desktop, Remote Access, and Microsoft Word, are already being actively exploited.

CVE-2026-21510: a Windows SmartScreen and Windows Shell security prompts bypass that can be exploited by convincing the targeted user to open a malicious link or shortcut file. CVE-2026-21514: a vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass OLE mitigations in Microsoft 365 and Office by tricking the target into opening a malicious Office file. CVE-2026-21513: an Internet Explorer issue that allows an attacker to bypass security controls and potentially execute code by convincing the victim to open a malicious HTML or LNK file.

Researchers at Trend Micro said in March that nearly a thousand malicious .lnk samples dating back to 2017 exploited this weakness across a mix of state-sponsored and cybercriminal campaigns worldwide. "Our analysis revealed that 11 state-sponsored groups from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China have employed ZDI-CAN-25373 in operations primarily motivated by cyber espionage and data theft," it said at the time.

Microsoft has released the Patch Tuesday updates for November 2025. For home users of Windows 11 23H2, this also means the end of support. The company is urging users to switch to version 25H2. Microsoft previously announced that Windows 11 23H2 Home and Pro would no longer be supported as of November 11, 2025. Enterprise and Education editions will continue to receive updates until November 2026.