Welcome to our August 2026 Patch Tuesday recap. Last month I declared patchageddon was officially upon us as Microsoft released around 600 CVEs fueled by AI and what I can only assume was an unhealthy amount of White Monster. It’s safe to say that our theories over the last few months about AI’s potential impact on patch releases were pretty spot on. Now we get to find out if this is our new normal, or if patchageddon was a one-time thing.
Let’s get into the details and find out how Microsoft plans to make us suffer this month!
Severity
Total exploits patched: 398
Critical patches: 42
Important: 355
Moderate: 1
Low: 0
Vulnerability impact
Remote code execution: 108
Elevation of privilege: 162
Information disclosure: 84
Spoofing: 17
Tampering: 4
Denial of service: 12
Feature bypass: 11
Availability
Publicly disclosed: 2
Actively exploited: 1
Some highlights (or lowlights)
CVE-2026-62878: Shocking absolutely nobody, DNS is our first highlight this month. CVE-2026-62878 is just one of six DNS RCE vulnerabilities patched this month, alongside 10 more DNS elevation of privilege exploits. 62878 is particularly bad with a network attack vector, low complexity, and no privileges or user interaction required. Ah, DNS, I can’t stay mad at you. You are the navigator of all our digital journeys.
CVE-2026-59124: Next up, we’ve got a 9.8 “critical in disguise” vulnerability impacting Microsoft’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack. This vulnerability has all of the makings of a critical vulnerability, yet Microsoft classified it as “Important” instead. I’ve reached out to Satya Nadella for an explanation, to which we replied “New phone, who dis?” If you’re using HPC Pack for those heavy computational workloads, definitely don’t overlook this one, even though it’s only rated important.
CVE-2026-68820: And finally, coming in at a modest 7.0 is our only actively exploited vulnerability, CVE-2026-68820. This bug targets the Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock, a core component that handles low-level networking functions on Windows. While actively exploited vulnerabilities are always a bad time, this one does require existing low-level privileges, and it has a high complexity with a local attack vector. So we’re talking Goosebumps level of scary, not The Shining.
Wrapping up
Patchageddon or not, the grind never stops. Microsoft keeps shipping, the bad guys keep scheming, and we keep patching, testing, and questioning our career choices somewhere around 2 a.m. It's the circle of sysadmin life. Lucky for you, PDQ Connect exists to make that circle a little less painful. Automate your deployments and reclaim some of that inner calm you lost last month.
