Do you hear that? That’s the sound of Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé echoing throughout our communities, which means two things: the holidays are upon us, and December’s Patch Tuesday is here! Let’s see what Santa Gates has brought us this year.
Severity
Total exploits patched: 56
Critical patches: 2
Important: 54
Moderate: 0
Low: 0
Vulnerability impact
Remote code execution: 19
Elevation of privilege: 28
Information disclosure: 4
Spoofing: 2
Tampering:
Denial of service: 3
Feature bypass:
Availability
Publicly disclosed: 2
Actively exploited: 1
Some highlights (or lowlights)
CVE-2025-62554: One of our two critically rated CVEs for the month is CVE-2025-62554, coming in at a humble 8.4 CVSS score. This is a type confusion vulnerability in Microsoft Office, which is where a program misidentifies one data type for another type of data, which can lead to all sorts of wacky, unexpected behavior. Or, in this case, remote code execution. But come on, don't be too hard on your Office applications. If you had to spend all day identifying data types, you'd probably mess up occasionally, too. Microsoft Office is sorry it's not perfect. It just wants to be good enough for you.
CVE-2025-54100: Do you love parsing web pages with PowerShell? Who doesn't, right? I use it all the time to find great deals on Temu and AliExpress. Well, thanks to a PowerShell command injection exploit, our days of frivolous parsing are coming to an end. Instead, Microsoft encourages us to practice safe parsing by using the -UseBasicParsing switch to avoid script code execution.
CVE-2025-62221: CVE-2025-62221 is a "use after free" vulnerability impacting the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver that is actively being exploited in the wild. While Microsoft doesn't provide many details about the exploit, this vulnerability could allow an attacker to gain system privileges on a device. And if you're wondering if this impacts you, if you're running a Windows OS, then yes, this impacts you. Does that mean it's time to panic? No, but it's probably okay to freak out just a little bit. You know, just the right amount of panic.
Wrapping up
I used to think that cybercriminals took time off for the holidays, but now I understand they’ve got their own gift lists to fulfill. Needless to say, stay vigilant out there. Bad actors are out to get your company data and your grandma’s GameStop gift cards. Those gift cards are meant for your stockings, not theirs.
