Microsoft Patch Tuesday for October 2026 — Snort rules and prominent security flaws

What happened

Blog post covering the vulnerabilities disclosed during Microsoft Patch Tuesday. Microsoft has released its monthly security update for October 2026, which includes 1415 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 85 that Microsoft marked as "critical." Microsoft is a software and software development company based in Redmond, and its products and services include Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft notes that 1 of the vulnerabilities disclosed this month have been exploited in the wild CVE-2026-96951 (the public catalogue number for a specific software flaw) is a security feature bypass vulnerability that affects Windows Shell. The shared weakness is Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command ('Command Injection').

The vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 8.8. Out of 85 "critical" vulnerabilities, 67 are remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.

Key facts

• Microsoft has — released: its monthly security update for October 2026, which includes 1415 vulnerabilities affecting a range of products, including 85 that Microsoft marked as "critical."