Microsoft's May 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 154 vulnerabilities across Windows, Microsoft Office and Azure - 45 rated Critical, 3 publicly disclosed before the patch shipped, 3 already exploited in the wild. Patch CVE-2026-41091 first.
Why this number differs from other roundups. Microsoft's May 2026 release document lists 1,129 entries. 598 are Azure Linux (Mariner) OS package updates and 377 are republished Chromium fixes for Edge - neither is a Microsoft product vulnerability. The 154 above is the real Patch Tuesday set. See the breakdown →
Ranked by exploitation reality, not score alone. This month's exploited flaw is rated Important - a severity-sorted list would bury it.
Patch today
Confirmed attacks are already happening. Emergency change window.
CVE-2026-41091Microsoft Defender Elevation of Privilege VulnerabilityCVE-2026-45498Microsoft Defender Denial of Service VulnerabilityCVE-2026-42897Microsoft Exchange Server Spoofing VulnerabilityPatch this week
Details are already public. Working exploits typically follow within days.
CVE-2026-45585Windows BitLocker Security Feature Bypass VulnerabilityPatch this cycle
No known exploitation yet, but network-reachable and high impact.
CVE-2026-40361Microsoft Outlook and Word Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityCVE-2026-40364Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution VulnerabilityCVE-2026-41089Windows Netlogon Remote Code Execution VulnerabilitySee all 45 Critical →Most roundups quote a single number. These are three unrelated release streams.
Microsoft channel only · 154 CVEs
| Critical | 45 |
|---|---|
| Important | 108 |
| Moderate | 0 |
| Low | 1 |
What an attacker gains if it works
| Elevation of Privilege | 69 |
|---|---|
| Remote Code Execution | 37 |
| Information Disclosure | 17 |
| Spoofing | 12 |
| Denial of Service | 9 |
| Security Feature Bypass | 7 |
| Tampering | 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-2026-41091 | Microsoft Defender Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | ExploitedDisclosed | Microsoft Defender | — |
| Low | CVE-2026-45498 | Microsoft Defender Denial of Service Vulnerability | DoS | 4.0 | ExploitedDisclosed | Microsoft Defender | — |
| Critical | CVE-2026-42897 | Microsoft Exchange Server Spoofing Vulnerability | Spoofing | 8.1 | Exploited | Microsoft Exchange Server | 5094139 +3 |
| Important | CVE-2026-45585 | Windows BitLocker Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability | Bypass | 6.8 | DisclosedMore likely | Windows BitLocker | 5094125 +2 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-42822 | Azure Local Disconnected Operations (ALDO) Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 10.0 | More likely | Azure Local Disconnected Operations | — |
| Critical | CVE-2026-41103 | Microsoft SSO Plugin for Jira & Confluence Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 9.1 | More likely | Microsoft SSO Plugin for Jira & Confluence | — |
| Critical | CVE-2026-35435 | Azure AI Foundry Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 8.6 | More likely | Azure AI Foundry M365 published agents | — |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40361 | Microsoft Outlook and Word Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.4 | More likely | Microsoft Office | 5002858 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40364 | Microsoft Word Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.4 | More likely | Microsoft Office Word | 5002858 |
| Important | CVE-2026-33835 | Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver | 5087420 +12 |
| Important | CVE-2026-33837 | Windows TCP/IP Local Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows TCP/IP | 5087420 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2026-33840 | Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Win32K - ICOMP | 5087423 +4 |
| Important | CVE-2026-33841 | Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Kernel | 5087420 +11 |
| Important | CVE-2026-35417 | Windows Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Win32K - ICOMP | 5087420 +12 |
| Important | CVE-2026-40369 | Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Kernel | 5087423 +4 |
| Important | CVE-2026-40397 | Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Common Log File System Driver | 5087420 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2026-40398 | Windows Remote Desktop Services Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.8 | More likely | Windows Remote Desktop | 5087420 +15 |
| Important | CVE-2026-35416 | Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 7.0 | More likely | Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock | 5087420 +15 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-41089 | Windows Netlogon Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 9.8 | — | Windows Netlogon | 5087423 +8 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-41615 | Microsoft Authenticator Information Disclosure Vulnerability | Info Disc. | 9.6 | — | Microsoft Authenticator | — |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40402 | Windows Hyper-V Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability | EoP | 9.3 | — | Windows Hyper-V | 5087420 +3 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40365 | Microsoft SharePoint Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.8 | — | Microsoft Office SharePoint | 5002863 +2 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40403 | Windows Graphics Component Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.8 | — | Windows Win32K - GRFX | 5087420 +15 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40358 | Microsoft Office Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.4 | — | Microsoft Office | 5002866 |
| Critical | CVE-2026-40363 | Microsoft Office Remote Code Execution Vulnerability | RCE | 8.4 | — | Microsoft Office | 5002866 |
The same five steps every month, in the order that reduces risk fastest.
CVE-2026-41091 is rated Important and scores 7.8 - a CVSS-sorted list would bury the one flaw attackers are already using. Sort by exploited, then publicly disclosed, then severity.
Patch Management vs Vulnerability Management: What's the Difference? →This release means 69 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 →377 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 69 KB articles across every endpoint, staging them in rings, verifying installed state and producing the compliance evidence. See patch management →
Every month back to October 2024, with the same breakdown and the full CVE list.
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 September 8, 2026.
Microsoft fixed 154 vulnerabilities in May 2026, across Windows, Microsoft Office, Azure and Developer Tools. 45 are rated Critical, 3 were publicly disclosed before the patch shipped, and 3 were already being exploited. Note that Microsoft's release document lists 1,129 entries in total, but 598 of those are Azure Linux package updates and 377 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 377 Edge entries alongside Microsoft product fixes would inflate the headline number and imply work for your Windows Update rings that does not exist.
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