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Vulnerabilities & PatchesEmerging1 sourceJul 16, 2026 · 18:00via Cisco Talos

Begun, the Patch Wars have

Brief

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.

We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don’t mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability research. If you were like me, and guesstimating exactly when that shoe would drop, my money was on the middle of summer. And... well, friends, I hate to say it, but I was right.

This July’s Patch Tuesday is an absolute whopper. There are 622 vulnerabilities being patched, with 62 being a critical severity. To put this context, this month alone has more vulnerabilities listed than all of 2018 combined. Three are zero days, two of which are being actively exploited . July is usually a quiet month historically – two years ago, it was just five patches issued in total!

These are wild times, friends.

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