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Microsoft Patch Tuesday
December 2019

Microsoft's December 2019 Patch Tuesday fixes 38 vulnerabilities across Windows, Developer Tools and Microsoft Office - 7 rated Critical, one already exploited in the wild. Patch CVE-2019-1458 first.

Released December 10, 2019, 10:00 PT1 actively exploited39 KB articles to deploy

December 2019 Patch Tuesday at a glance

38
Microsoft CVEs
excl. Edge & Azure Linux
7
Critical
18% of the release
1
Actively exploited
CVE-2019-1458
0
Publicly disclosed
known before the patch
8.4
Highest CVSS
CVE-2019-1468
39
KB articles
what you actually deploy

Why this number differs from other roundups. Microsoft's December 2019 release document lists 56 entries. 18 are Azure Linux (Mariner) OS package updates and 0 are republished Chromium fixes for Edge - neither is a Microsoft product vulnerability. The 38 above is the real Patch Tuesday set. See the breakdown →

Priority order

Patch these first

Ranked by exploitation reality, not score alone. This month's exploited flaw is rated Important - a severity-sorted list would bury it.

Patch this week

Publicly disclosed

Details are already public. Working exploits typically follow within days.

Nothing was disclosed before the patch shipped.

The numbers

What’s in this release

Where the 56 entries actually come from

Most roundups quote a single number. These are three unrelated release streams.

38 Microsoft products18 Azure Linux (Mariner)

Severity

Microsoft channel only · 38 CVEs

December 2019 severity breakdown
Critical7
Important29
Moderate1
Low0
Unrated1

Impact type

What an attacker gains if it works

December 2019 impact breakdown
Information Disclosure15
Remote Code Execution11
Elevation of Privilege5
Spoofing3
Denial of Service1
Security Feature Bypass1
Tampering1
Other1

Most-affected components

Where this month’s fixes concentrate - filter by any of them in the table below

Microsoft Windows7Visual Studio7Microsoft Office5Microsoft Graphics Component4Windows Kernel3Windows Hyper-V2Windows Media Player2End of Life Software1Microsoft Office SharePoint1Microsoft Scripting Engine1Open Source Software1Skype for Business1
Every patch

Browse all 56 entries

Sorted by risk by default: exploited first, then publicly disclosed, then severity, then CVSS. Search by CVE, title, component or KB number.

Showing 38 of 38
38 Microsoft vulnerabilities in the December 2019 Patch Tuesday, sortable by severity, CVSS and exploit status.
TitleStatusKB
ImportantCVE-2019-1458Win32k Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.8ExploitedWindows Kernel4530681 +9
ImportantCVE-2019-1485VBScript Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE7.5More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4530677 +10
ImportantCVE-2019-1469Win32k Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5More likelyWindows Kernel4530684 +1
CriticalCVE-2019-1468Win32k Graphics Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE8.4—Microsoft Graphics Component4530681 +13
CriticalCVE-2019-1471Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE8.2—Windows Hyper-V4530684 +2
CriticalCVE-2019-1349Git for Visual Studio Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Visual Studio—
CriticalCVE-2019-1350Git for Visual Studio Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Visual Studio—
CriticalCVE-2019-1352Git for Visual Studio Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Visual Studio—
CriticalCVE-2019-1354Git for Visual Studio Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Visual Studio—
CriticalCVE-2019-1387Git for Visual Studio Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Visual Studio—
ImportantCVE-2019-1476Windows Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.8—Microsoft Windows4530684 +4
ImportantCVE-2019-1483Windows Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.8—Microsoft Windows4530684 +3
ImportantCVE-2019-1484Windows OLE Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE7.8—Windows OLE4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1453Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Denial of Service VulnerabilityDoS7.5—Microsoft Windows4530681 +11
ImportantCVE-2019-1470Windows Hyper-V Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.6.0—Windows Hyper-V4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1465Windows GDI Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5—Microsoft Graphics Component4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1466Windows GDI Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5—Microsoft Graphics Component4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1467Windows GDI Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5—Microsoft Graphics Component4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1472Windows Kernel Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5—Windows Kernel4530681 +5
ImportantCVE-2019-1474Windows Kernel Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.5.5—Microsoft Windows4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1488Microsoft Defender Security Feature Bypass VulnerabilityBypass3.3—Microsoft Windows4530681 +13
ImportantCVE-2019-1332Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services XSS VulnerabilitySpoofing-—SQL Server4532097 +1
ImportantCVE-2019-1400Microsoft Access Information Disclosure VulnerabilityInfo Disc.-—Microsoft Office4484180 +2
ImportantCVE-2019-1461Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Microsoft Office4475598 +3
ImportantCVE-2019-1462Microsoft PowerPoint Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE-—Microsoft Office4461590 +2
Your move

What your IT team should do

The same five steps every month, in the order that reduces risk fastest.

Test the known-issue candidates

Check the Windows release health dashboard before promoting past ring 1, and have the rollback path written down before you need it. Kernel, networking and authentication fixes are the ones that historically break things.

12 Patch Management Best Practices for 2026 →

Verify installed state, then evidence it

Confirm the patch is actually present on each endpoint rather than trusting that "deployment succeeded". Keep the resulting report - it is the artefact auditors ask for, and reconstructing it later is far more work than capturing it now.

Patch Management: The Complete Guide →

Trinetri does steps two through five automatically - detecting the 39 KB articles across every endpoint, staging them in rings, verifying installed state and producing the compliance evidence. See patch management →

Archive

Previous Patch Tuesdays

Every month Microsoft has published back to January 2016, each with the same breakdown and the full CVE list.

Older months104 releases, October 2024 – January 2016
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Patch Tuesday FAQ

Patch Tuesday falls on the second Tuesday of every month, with updates going live at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Microsoft introduced the practice in October 2003, following the Blaster worm, to cut distribution costs and give administrators a predictable cadence instead of patches arriving at random. The 10:00 a.m. timing is deliberate: it leaves a full working week to remediate before the weekend. Internally Microsoft calls it the "B" release; optional "C" and "D" preview releases follow later in the month. The next Patch Tuesday is November 10, 2026.

Microsoft fixed 38 vulnerabilities in December 2019, across Windows, Developer Tools, Microsoft Office and Browser. 7 are rated Critical, 0 were publicly disclosed before the patch shipped, and 1 was already being exploited. Note that Microsoft's release document lists 56 entries in total, but 18 of those are Azure Linux package updates and 0 are republished Chromium fixes for Edge, which is why other sources sometimes quote a much larger number.

Exploit Wednesday is the day after Patch Tuesday. Attackers compare the newly released patches against the previous version to locate the flaw each one fixes, then build working exploits from that difference - often within 24 to 48 hours. It is the reason the deployment window matters as much as the patch itself: every hour a Critical remote code execution fix sits undeployed is an hour of measurable exposure.

A workable target for most organisations: actively exploited vulnerabilities within 24 hours, publicly disclosed ones within 72 hours, remaining Critical fixes within seven days, and everything else within the month. CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue sets binding deadlines for US federal agencies and is a reasonable benchmark for everyone else. Stage the rollout in rings rather than deploying everywhere at once, so a regression is caught on a pilot group instead of in production.

An out-of-band update is a patch released outside the monthly cycle because the risk will not wait for the next Patch Tuesday. Microsoft issues them for actively exploited flaws with no mitigation - most famously during the WannaCry outbreak in 2017, when it took the unusual step of patching versions of Windows that were already out of support.

Yes. Adobe aligned its releases with Patch Tuesday in November 2012, and both SAP's Security Patch Day and Oracle's quarterly Critical Patch Updates are coordinated to the same week. Part of the reason is defensive: staggered releases let attackers reverse-engineer one vendor's patch to find the same underlying flaw in another's still-unpatched product. For IT teams it means the second Tuesday is rarely just a Microsoft problem.

Edge is built on Chromium, so most of its security fixes originate with the Chromium project and are republished by Microsoft under their own CVE identifiers. They ship on Chromium's cadence rather than the Patch Tuesday cycle, and they are delivered by Edge's own updater rather than Windows Update. Counting the 0 Edge entries alongside Microsoft product fixes would inflate the headline number and imply work for your Windows Update rings that does not exist.