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Microsoft Patch Tuesday
February 2018

Microsoft's February 2018 Patch Tuesday fixes 50 vulnerabilities across Windows, Browser and Microsoft Office - 14 rated Critical. No active exploitation this month, so lead with the 14 Critical remote code execution fixes.

Released February 13, 2018, 10:00 PT36 KB articles to deploy

February 2018 Patch Tuesday at a glance

50
Microsoft CVEs
excl. Edge & Azure Linux
14
Critical
28% of the release
0
Actively exploited
none this month
0
Publicly disclosed
known before the patch
8.1
Highest CVSS
CVE-2018-0825
36
KB articles
what you actually deploy

Why this number differs from other roundups. Microsoft's February 2018 release document lists 61 entries. 8 are Azure Linux (Mariner) OS package updates and 3 are republished Chromium fixes for Edge - neither is a Microsoft product vulnerability. The 50 above is the real Patch Tuesday set. See the breakdown →

Priority order

Patch these first

Ranked by exploitation reality, not score alone. Nothing is under active attack this month, so the Critical remote-code-execution fixes lead.

Patch today

Exploited in the wild

Confirmed attacks are already happening. Emergency change window.

No actively exploited vulnerabilities in this release.

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 61 entries actually come from

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

50 Microsoft products8 Azure Linux (Mariner)3 Edge (Chromium)

Severity

Microsoft channel only · 50 CVEs

February 2018 severity breakdown
Critical14
Important34
Moderate1
Low0
Unrated1

Impact type

What an attacker gains if it works

February 2018 impact breakdown
Remote Code Execution19
Elevation of Privilege16
Information Disclosure12
Denial of Service1
Security Feature Bypass1
Other1

Most-affected components

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

Microsoft Scripting Engine12Windows Kernel11Microsoft Windows8Microsoft Office7Graphic Fonts4Common Log File System Driver2Adobe Flash Player1Device Guard1Microsoft Browsers1Microsoft Identity Manager1Windows Authentication Methods1Windows SMB Server1
Every patch

Browse all 61 entries

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

Showing 50 of 50
50 Microsoft vulnerabilities in the February 2018 Patch Tuesday, sortable by severity, CVSS and exploit status.
TitleStatusKB
CriticalCVE-2018-0825StructuredQuery Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityRCE8.1More likelyMicrosoft Windows4074587 +11
CriticalCVE-2018-0840Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE7.5More likelyMicrosoft Browsers4074588 +8
CriticalCVE-2018-0834Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0835Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0837Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0838Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0856Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +1
CriticalCVE-2018-0857Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0858Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine—
CriticalCVE-2018-0859Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +5
CriticalCVE-2018-0860Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +4
CriticalCVE-2018-0861Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE4.2More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074590 +1
ImportantCVE-2018-0844Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.8More likelyCommon Log File System Driver4073079 +11
ImportantCVE-2018-0846Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.8More likelyCommon Log File System Driver4073079 +11
ImportantCVE-2018-0866Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityRCE7.5More likelyMicrosoft Scripting Engine4074588 +8
ImportantCVE-2018-0742Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyWindows Kernel4074587 +11
ImportantCVE-2018-0756Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyWindows Kernel4074588 +4
ImportantCVE-2018-0809Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyWindows Kernel4074588 +1
ImportantCVE-2018-0820Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyMicrosoft Windows4073080 +11
ImportantCVE-2018-0822Windows NTFS Global Reparse Point Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyMicrosoft Windows4074588 +4
ImportantCVE-2018-0823Named Pipe File System Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyMicrosoft Windows4074588
ImportantCVE-2018-0826Windows Storage Services Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP7.0More likelyMicrosoft Windows4074588 +3
ImportantCVE-2018-0842Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP6.7More likelyWindows Kernel4074587 +11
ImportantCVE-2018-0821Windows AppContainer Elevation Of Privilege VulnerabilityEoP5.3More likelyMicrosoft Windows4074588 +4
ImportantCVE-2018-0847Windows Scripting Engine Memory Corruption VulnerabilityInfo Disc.4.3More likelyMicrosoft Windows4034044 +11
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 36 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 50 vulnerabilities in February 2018, across Windows, Browser, Microsoft Office and System Center. 14 are rated Critical, 0 were publicly disclosed before the patch shipped, and 0 were already being exploited. Note that Microsoft's release document lists 61 entries in total, but 8 of those are Azure Linux package updates and 3 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 3 Edge entries alongside Microsoft product fixes would inflate the headline number and imply work for your Windows Update rings that does not exist.