Microsoft breaks another patch Tuesday record

Engineers at Microsoft typically enjoy a quieter summer to take vacations and spend time with family, as is common at many companies. But this year, the season has been unusually busy for Windows and security engineers, thanks to new AI models that are discovering software vulnerabilities at a rapid pace. Sources tell me that Microsoft will set another patch Tuesday record today, the third in just a few months. It all kicked off in April when Anthropic’s new Mythos model found security vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser.” A few weeks later, OpenAI released its own cybersecurity-focused model to trusted partners. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s security work tell me both of these models have contributed to a record-breaking series of patch Tuesdays over the summer period. Microsoft typically patches around 100 flaws every month, but in June it set a new record of around 200 fixes. July’s patch Tuesday was even bigger, with Microsoft patching at least 570 security holes, almost triple the number of June’s record-breaking release. Microsoft engineers…