The 2026 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report highlights that total vulnerabilities dropped by 6% and Microsoft Edge vulnerabilities plummeted by 83%. Critical vulnerabilities doubled year-over-year, rising from 78 to 157.
BeyondTrust has released the 13th edition of its annual Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report. The 2026 report reveals a ‘Maturity Mirage.’ While Microsoft’s continued security investments have successfully reduced the total volume of vulnerabilities by 6%, the severity of remaining flaws is concentrating. Critical vulnerabilities have doubled year-over-year, signaling a shift toward more surgical, high-impact threats
The report provides an in-depth analysis of data from publicly issued Microsoft security bulletins published throughout 2025. It highlights a shifting risk profile driven by AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, expanding cloud adoption, and increasingly sophisticated attacker strategies targeting identity and privilege.
The Expert Take: Privilege is the New Perimeter as per Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report 2026
James Maude, Field CTO at BeyondTrust, warns that the drop in total numbers shouldn’t lead to complacency.
"Don't be distracted by the dip in total vulnerabilities. Critical vulnerabilities doubled. This is a warning that risk is not decreasing, it is concentrating, and it is concentrating around privilege. Elevation of Privilege made up 40% of all vulnerabilities again this year because that is exactly what attackers need to reach critical systems.”
“A ninefold increase in Azure and Dynamics 365 critical vulnerabilities shows where that concentration is happening. Combined with the rising tide of identity compromise attacks that exploit standing privilege, patching alone will not close this gap. The organizations that weather this are the ones treating every vulnerability and identity, human or machine, as a potential path to privilege in their most critical systems, and shrinking those paths before an attacker reaches them."
This concentration on privilege aligns with recent findings in the SentinelOne report on enterprise system exploitation, which highlighted how identity has become the primary battleground for modern attackers.
Key Highlights from the Report: A Surface-Level Decline Masks a Deeper Shift in Risk
Microsoft reported 1,273 total vulnerabilities, a 6% decrease from 1,360 in 2024.
At first glance, this decline suggests improvement, potentially reflecting Microsoft’s continued investment in security is maintaining control, despite a rapidly expanding attack surface.
At the same time:
- Critical vulnerabilities doubled year-over-year, rising from 78 to 157, reversing a multi-year downward trend.
- Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities accounted for 40% (509) of all reported vulnerabilities, reinforcing their role as the most direct path for attackers to escalate access, move laterally, and compromise critical systems. This highlights the continued importance of identity and privilege in modern attack chains.
Maude’s focus on identity is echoed in the recent Sophos Active Adversary Report 2026, which similarly found that compromised credentials and identity-based attacks are now the primary entry point for regional breaches
Cloud and Enterprise Platforms Drive Critical Risk Expansion
- Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 experienced a 9x increase in critical vulnerabilities, rising from 4 to 37
- Microsoft Office vulnerabilities surged to 157, more than tripling year-over-year
- Critical vulnerabilities in Office increased 10x
While critical risk surged across cloud and enterprise platforms, other areas showed signs of improvement:
- Microsoft Edge vulnerabilities dropped significantly to 50 in 2025, an 83% decrease year-over-year
Security Takeaways:
- AI is changing the vulnerability equation — AI is accelerating discovery for defenders, while also enabling attackers to analyze patches, reverse engineer fixes, and operationalize exploits faster than ever. This creates a widening gap between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation, where organizations may be exposed before traditional defenses can respond.
- Hear from experts why CVE counts no longer tell the full story — Emerging risks, such as over-privileged AI agents, long-lived machine credentials, and identity misconfigurations, often do not appear in CVE counts, despite carrying significant impact, meaning traditional vulnerability tracking is no longer capturing the full picture.
Key Priorities for Organizations according to BeyondTrust:
- Patch faster—but assume compromise is still possible
- Apply least privilege to limit the blast radius of an attack and create opportunities for detection and response
- Adopt identity-first security strategies that secure all identities, human and non-human
- Focus on paths to privilege, not just individual vulnerabilities
Download the full 2026 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report here.
Disclaimer: The BeyondTrust Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report is based on publicly disclosed vulnerabilities from Microsoft security bulletins and provides a comprehensive analysis of trends across operating systems, cloud platforms, and enterprise applications.
