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Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 964 CVEs (CVE-2026-81963, CVE-2026-85880)
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record 964 CVEs, including two zero-days actively exploited in the wild.
Microsoft patched a record 964 CVEs in its September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with 101 rated critical and 824 rated important, making it the largest Patch Tuesday to date. The release includes fixes for two zero-days that were exploited in the wild, with CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 highlighted in the release. Affected products span Windows core components, Office, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, Active Directory services (including AD CS and AD FS) and numerous Azure services. Tenable notes the release surpasses July's as the biggest ever.
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Akira Ransomware Uses Safe Mode to Bypass EDR
An Akira affiliate rebooted a compromised host into Safe Mode to bypass EDR, but constrained memory crashed the encryptor before encryption completed.
Huntress reports an Akira affiliate gained access on August 4 via an MFA-less SonicWall VPN, enumerated Active Directory, archived file shares with WinRAR, and exfiltrated data to an attacker S3 bucket. The attacker rebooted the host into Safe Mode with Networking and preloaded AnyDesk into the Safe Mode service registry, disabling EDR and Defender's real-time protection for roughly ten minutes. The encryptor failed about 13 seconds after launch with out-of-virtual-memory errors caused by Safe Mode's stripped-down environment, and Defender later removed akira.exe after reboot. Huntress says this is the first observed Safe Mode abuse by Akira, following precedents by Snatch and AvosLocker, and provides detection guidance.
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Microsoft Releases Emergency Windows 11 Update Following Patch Tuesday Bugs
Microsoft issued emergency Windows 11 update KB5129195 to fix Patch Tuesday regressions and fully close the CVE-2026-62721 privilege escalation flaw.
Microsoft shipped out-of-band cumulative update KB5129195 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 (builds 26100.9457 and 26200.9457) after the September 8 Patch Tuesday rollup, which addressed over 960 CVEs including two actively exploited flaws, broke Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V Plan9 folder sharing, and USB audio. The emergency release also strengthens the incomplete fix for CVE-2026-62721, an elevation-of-privilege flaw in the Windows User-Mode Power Service that could let a local attacker gain SYSTEM privileges. Companion patches cover Windows 11 26H1, Windows 10, and Windows Server. Some USB Audio Class 1.0 and AMD Radeon graphics issues remain unresolved.
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Iranian cyber targeting of dissidents, activists and journalists
UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD expose CHOSEN BRICK spyware used by Iranian state actors against dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide.
A joint advisory from the UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD details CHOSEN BRICK, a Windows spyware family used by Iranian state cyber actors since at least 2025 against dissidents, activists, and journalists in the UK, US, and Netherlands. Actors build rapport on WhatsApp and Telegram impersonating known contacts or platform support, then deliver disguised payloads resembling apps such as Telegram, Norton, RunwayML, or fake MRI results. The malware persists via HKCU Run registry keys, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses a unique Telegram bot C2 per victim. Capabilities include screen capture, microphone recording, process enumeration, email and messaging data theft, file deletion, and system wiping; victim data has appeared on pro-Iranian leak sites.
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Microsoft September 2026 Patch Tuesday Fixes 973 Vulnerabilities and 2 Exploited Zero-Days
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 973 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days already exploited in the wild.
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 973 vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, and Azure components, including two zero-days already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-81963, an elevation of privilege flaw in the Windows Update Stack, is flagged as an exploited zero-day. The release includes numerous remote code execution and information disclosure fixes for Microsoft Excel and Word, plus patches for the Windows kernel, ALPC, Print Spooler, ReFS, Entra ID, and Azure CLI.
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China-linked Fire Ant Hides Inside Trusted Infrastructure
China-linked Fire Ant backdoored Cisco IOS XR routers, injected TACACS libraries to steal credentials, and rewrote logs across infrastructure targets.
Sygnia reports the China-linked espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers with purpose-built malware, injected a library into the TACACS authentication daemon to capture live credential material, and manipulated syslog so only messages containing 'Health' were logged. The group used GRE tunnel interfaces with no commit history, rewrote wtmp/utmp/btmp login records, and deployed dormant deep backdoors on Linux systems — one disguised as a SentinelOne agent, another activated by raw network traffic carrying a magic string. Code-level overlap with UNC3886 tooling suggests evolution of that China-nexus cluster's TACACS credential-collection techniques, and Fire Ant used compromised infrastructure to scan SSH, RDP and web ports toward high-value networks.
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Threat Brief: Ongoing Russia and Ukraine Cyber Activity
Ukrainian government sites were defaced via OctoberCMS CVE-2021-32648 while Microsoft-attributed actor DEV-0586 deployed destructive WhisperGate malware.
Unit 42 tracks January 2022 attacks against Ukrainian government websites that were defaced or made inaccessible, which Ukraine attributed to Russia. Attackers exploited CVE-2021-32648, an account takeover flaw in OctoberCMS prior to 1.0.472, by submitting a boolean true as the password reset code to bypass validation. Separately, WhisperGate malware, attributed by Microsoft to DEV-0586, disabled Windows Defender and corrupted files across multiple Ukrainian organizations, using a ransomware-appearing first stage and an HTTPS-beaconing second stage with LOLBINs and anti-analysis techniques.
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday for August 2026 Fixed a Zero
Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 398 CVEs, including an actively exploited WinSock zero-day CVE-2026-68820 and wormable DNS RCE CVE-2026-62878.
Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 398 CVEs across Windows, Office, Azure, Exchange Server, SharePoint, Teams, .NET and other products, with 62 rated Critical. The actively exploited CVE-2026-68820 is a use-after-free in the Windows WinSock afd.sys driver that can yield SYSTEM privileges via a race condition. CVE-2026-62878 is a critical, wormable stack buffer overflow in Windows DNS Server allowing unauthenticated, remote code execution without user interaction. Other notable fixes include WDS TFTP RCE CVE-2026-62893, a QUIC flaw affecting roughly 13.5 million sites (CVE-2026-62815), an Exchange authentication bypass EoP demonstrated at Pwn2Own Berlin (CVE-2026-62911), and two TPM 2.0 reference implementation fixes.
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