Patch today
Exploited in the wild
Confirmed attacks are already happening. Emergency change window.
No actively exploited vulnerabilities in this release.
Microsoft's February 2022 Patch Tuesday fixes 48 vulnerabilities across Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics - 1 publicly disclosed before the patch shipped.
Why this number differs from other roundups. Microsoft's February 2022 release document lists 189 entries. 110 are Azure Linux (Mariner) OS package updates and 31 are republished Chromium fixes for Edge - neither is a Microsoft product vulnerability. The 48 above is the real Patch Tuesday set. See the breakdown →
Ranked by exploitation reality, not score alone. Nothing is under active attack this month, so the Critical remote-code-execution fixes lead.
Patch today
Confirmed attacks are already happening. Emergency change window.
No actively exploited vulnerabilities in this release.
Patch this week
Details are already public. Working exploits typically follow within days.
CVE-2022-21989Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityPatch this cycle
No known exploitation yet, but network-reachable and high impact.
No Critical remote code execution fixes this month.
Most roundups quote a single number. These are three unrelated release streams.
Microsoft channel only · 48 CVEs
| Critical | 0 |
|---|---|
| Important | 48 |
| Moderate | 0 |
| Low | 0 |
What an attacker gains if it works
| Remote Code Execution | 16 |
|---|---|
| Elevation of Privilege | 15 |
| Information Disclosure | 6 |
| Denial of Service | 5 |
| Spoofing | 3 |
| Security Feature Bypass | 3 |
Where this month’s fixes concentrate - filter by any of them in the table below
Sorted by risk by default: exploited first, then publicly disclosed, then severity, then CVSS. Search by CVE, title, component or KB number.
| Title | Status | KB | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Important | CVE-2022-21989 | Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | DisclosedMore likely | Windows Kernel | 5010342 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22005 | Microsoft SharePoint Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.8 | More likely | Microsoft Office SharePoint | 5002120 +3 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21981 | Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Common Log File System Driver | 5010342 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21994 | Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows DWM Core Library | 5010342 +5 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21996 | Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Win32K | 5010386 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21999 | Windows Print Spooler Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Print Spooler Components | 5010342 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22000 | Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Common Log File System Driver | 5010342 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22715 | Named Pipe File System Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Named Pipe File System | 5010342 +5 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22718 | Windows Print Spooler Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Print Spooler Components | 5010342 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21984 | Windows DNS Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.8 | — | Role: DNS Server | 5010342 +4 |
| Important | CVE-2022-23274 | Microsoft Dynamics GP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.8 | — | Microsoft Dynamics GP | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-21991 | Visual Studio Code Remote Development Extension Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.1 | — | Visual Studio Code | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-23256 | Azure Data Explorer Spoofing Vulnerability | Spoofing | 8.1 | — | Azure Data Explorer | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-23272 | Microsoft Dynamics GP Elevation Of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 8.1 | — | Microsoft Dynamics GP | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-21987 | Microsoft SharePoint Server Spoofing Vulnerability | Spoofing | 8.0 | — | Microsoft Office SharePoint | 5002120 +3 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21995 | Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.9 | — | Role: Windows Hyper-V | 5010342 +7 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21844 | HEVC Video Extensions Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Microsoft Windows Codecs Library | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-21926 | HEVC Video Extensions Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Microsoft Windows Codecs Library | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-21971 | Windows Runtime Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Windows Remote Procedure Call Runtime | 5010342 +5 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21974 | Roaming Security Rights Management Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Roaming Security Rights Management Services | 5010342 +6 |
| Important | CVE-2022-21988 | Microsoft Office Visio Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Microsoft Office Visio | — |
| Important | CVE-2022-21992 | Windows Mobile Device Management Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Windows Kernel | 5010342 +6 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22001 | Windows Remote Access Connection Manager Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | — | Windows Remote Access Connection Manager | 5010342 +11 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22003 | Microsoft Office Graphics Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Microsoft Office | 5002140 +1 |
| Important | CVE-2022-22004 | Microsoft Office ClickToRun Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 7.8 | — | Microsoft Office | — |
The same five steps every month, in the order that reduces risk fastest.
Nothing is under active attack this month, so rank by exploitability forecast and reachability rather than raw score. A Critical flaw on an internet-facing service outranks a higher-scoring one behind authentication.
Patch Management vs Vulnerability Management: What's the Difference? →This release means 33 distinct update packages to deploy. Pilot on ring 0 within 24 hours and widen to production by day seven - never push the whole set everywhere at once.
What is Ring-Based Patch Deployment? A Guide to Progressive Rollouts →The Patch Management Lifecycle: 6 Stages from Discovery to Verification →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 →31 Chromium fixes for Edge shipped alongside this release on their own updater, and Adobe, SAP and Oracle release in the same week. OS-only patching leaves most of your real attack surface untouched.
What is Third-Party Patch Management and Why OS Patching Isn't Enough →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 33 KB articles across every endpoint, staging them in rings, verifying installed state and producing the compliance evidence. See patch management →
Every month Microsoft has published back to January 2016, each with the same breakdown and the full CVE list.
Experience how Trinetri transforms endpoint chaos into clarity. Try the 30 minute demo session, our experts will walk you through how AI-powered automation, real-time visibility, and unified control can secure your entire hybrid environment, without the overhead.
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 48 vulnerabilities in February 2022, across Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Dynamics and Developer Tools. 0 are rated Critical, 1 were publicly disclosed before the patch shipped, and 0 were already being exploited. Note that Microsoft's release document lists 189 entries in total, but 110 of those are Azure Linux package updates and 31 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 31 Edge entries alongside Microsoft product fixes would inflate the headline number and imply work for your Windows Update rings that does not exist.