Dissecting the 2025 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report: Key Trends and Insights

Many of the day-to-day digital operations of businesses, governments, and critical infrastructure have one thing in common: Microsoft. From the Microsoft Windows operating systems powering endpoints and servers, to Azure's rapidly growing cloud services, Microsoft's products are everywhere, making the company and its products attractive targets for threat actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities at scale.

With more than 1.4 billion Windows users around the globe and the adoption of platforms like Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and Azure surging, a single exploitable vulnerability in a Microsoft product can open the door to privilege escalation, lateral movement, or ransomware deployments that impact tens of thousands of interconnected systems. Whether nation state or financially motivated, modern cyber-crime syndicates will consistently take the path of least resistance, and vulnerable assets are a reliable attack vector.

For twelve years, the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report, authored by BeyondTrust, has been the barometer for how secure the world's most widely used software ecosystem truly is. By transforming the raw data behind Microsoft CVEs into actionable intelligence, the annual report helps security leaders understand how vulnerability categories shift over time, how product-specific risks rise or fall, where Microsoft's defenses have strengthened and critical gaps still persist, and where future risks may emerge. The report, in many ways, is both a history lesson and a prediction of the future. In recent years, it has also underscored how identity has become a core part of the attack chain, and that modern breaches often involve a combination of both traditional vulnerabilities and credential-based attack vectors.

And in the 2025 edition of the report, findings and analysis reinforce the need to take a breath and ensure security patches are being deployed in a timely fashion, but always after in-house testing.

Overview of the 2025 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report

The 2025 edition of the BeyondTrust Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report highlighted a record 1,360 total Microsoft vulnerabilities disclosed in 2024. This is an 11% increase from the previous peak of 1,292 in 2022. It's a reminder that no matter how many best practices we create, how much expert training we provide to developers, and how thoroughly we test code via quality assurance and penetration testing, humans and AI still create software with exploitable vulnerabilities. It doesn't matter which code review methods you're using. Even with AI-generated code, we're still humans, and we're still making software-based mistakes.

Total vulnerabilities reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2024, an 11% increase from the previous record of 1,292 in 2022

But amidst the heap of vulnerabilities lies a silver lining: Microsoft critical vulnerabilities (the ones that keep CISOs awake at night) have declined to their lowest level in over a decade. In 2024, just 78 Microsoft vulnerabilities were rated as critical, compared to 196 in 2020. For perspective, in 2013, critical issues represented a staggering 44% of Microsoft's public vulnerability disclosures. In 2024, that number dropped to just under 6%.

Microsoft is getting better at addressing critical vulnerabilities and developing code without as many critical risks. They've improved their tooling and educated developers. With that said, the critical vulnerabilities that do emerge tend to be novel and harder to exploit.

Critical vulnerabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem continued to decline overall in 2024.

While it may seem like we have two competing narratives here: rising total vulnerabilities alongside a drop in severity, there is a more nuanced picture. Microsoft, and its ecosystem, is making real progress in some of the areas that matter most. It's a win, but an incomplete one. Attack surfaces are still expanding, the volume of vulnerabilities is expanding, and adversaries are adapting just as fast to exploit them in new ways, including via identity attack vectors.

The Privilege + Execution Combo: Why EoP and RCE Still Dominate the Threat Landscape

Any threat actor looking to exploit a system has two primary objectives:

1. They need to execute code, whether through malware or living off the land (LOTL) attacks.
2. They need a high enough level of privileges to execute code and ultimately achieve their objectives.

Remote Code Execution (RCE) and Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities provide the perfect one-two punch to achieve both, and threat actors know it.

For the fifth year in a row, EoP vulnerabilities led all vulnerability categories, making up 40% of Microsoft's disclosures in 2024. It's a reminder that attackers often find it easier to log in than to hack in, especially when they can piggyback off of legitimate accounts and escalate access. Once inside, privilege is power. It's the difference between peeking in a window with limited visibility and holding the keys to the castle with free reign to traverse anywhere, including the dungeons.

That 40% number is profound. These vulnerabilities allow attackers to escalate from a standard user to full administrator. And once they ascend to that privileged state, they can move laterally, load malware, and access systems they shouldn't. That's how catastrophic breaches happen and often go undetected for long periods of time.

Elevation of Privilege (EoP) and Remote Code Execution (RCE) continue to dominate the vulnerability categories year-over-year.

EoP vulnerabilities enable lateral movement, privilege escalation, and broader compromise. Without foundational controls like least privilege in place, even well-architected zero trust environments can quickly fall apart. This is especially true for organizations with sprawling, unmanaged privileged accounts. With 40% of Microsoft vulnerabilities in 2024 allowing for elevation of privileges, any users operating as local administrators are like shooting fish in a barrel for threat actors. It is easy pickings.RCE vulnerabilities allow adversaries to execute malicious code remotely, and often before authentication. Attack vectors like unpatched software, web services, or malicious documents are prime targets. In 2024, RCE comprised 32% of Microsoft's total vulnerabilities. That's a significant drop from 58% in 2013, but one-third of the attack surface is still massive when you consider the scale of Microsoft's footprint.

Individually, each class of vulnerability is dangerous. But when combined, and when RCE delivers the payload and EoP grants the permissions, the results can lead to a significant security incident. That's why, even with a reduction in critical vulnerabilities overall, the enduring dominance of RCE and EoP should be a wake-up call to remediate all vulnerabilities in a timely manner.

The Surprise in the Jack in the Box: The Return of Obsolete Protocols

One of the more unsettling trends is the rise of Security Feature Bypass vulnerabilities, which have tripled since 2020, surging from 30 to 90 disclosures. These aren't theoretical concerns: attackers are going after legacy security controls, and many are proving easy attack vectors for compromise. Last year's report covered how RomCom, the Russian cybercrime group, exploited CVE-2023-36884 to sidestep Microsoft's "Mark of the Web" protections. In 2024, we saw similar bypasses (like CVE-2024-38226 and CVE-2024-38217) targeting outdated defenses.

It's just more software on software. Security tooling is still software, and it can be exploited like anything else. That's why 60% of bypass vulnerabilities now target those protection layers themselves.

Microsoft has some catching up to do here. Legacy features such as User Account Control and Mark of the Web (relics from the Windows XP era) are no match for today's phishing toolkits and social engineering campaigns. While Microsoft has made strides in modernizing security, the continued exploitation of obsolete protocols and legacy controls signals a pressing need to retire, not just outdated systems, but the aging security assumptions they're built on. Unfortunately, it reinforces that these older systems were not secure by design, but rather security was truly a bolted-on afterthought.

Impact on Specific Microsoft Products

Although Internet Explorer (IE) was officially retired in 2022, its ghost continues to haunt enterprise environments. In 2024, attackers exploited MSHTML, a legacy IE component, to mask malicious files, highlighting the dangers of end-of-life technology still lingering in production environments. And Microsoft's current browser didn't escape scrutiny either: Microsoft Edge saw its zero critical vulnerability streak broken, with nine critical flaws reported. These vulnerabilities allowed attackers to escape the browser sandbox and execute code with local privileges, prompting multiple CISA advisories. When combined with poor privilege management (such as allowing users to run as local admins), these weaknesses dramatically increased risk exposure for organizations.

Microsoft Edge vulnerabilities increased by 17% to 292 total vulnerabilities, including 9 critical vulnerabilities in 2024, compared to zero in 2022.

Windows still remains both Microsoft's flagship product and its Achilles' heel. In 2024, Windows accounted for 587 reported vulnerabilities, with 33 classified as critical. While some vulnerabilities stemmed from outdated tech still in use (like IE), others were entirely new, including CVE-2024-49138, a zero-day in the CLFS driver that granted SYSTEM-level access. The irony is hard to miss: despite Windows 11 being touted as Microsoft's most secure OS to date, vulnerabilities rooted in 20-year-old legacy code continue to surface, undermining the promise of modern security.

There were 587 Windows vulnerabilities in 2024; 33 were critical.

Unfortunately, in the cloud, things aren't much better. Azure vulnerabilities nearly doubled since 2020. While it's encouraging that critical issues are down elsewhere, the newest risk frontier is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2024, CVE-2024-38206 and CVE-2024-38109 exposed vulnerabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure Health Bot, involving information disclosure and privilege escalation.

AI is emerging as an attack vector that everyone should be concerned about. We're embedding AI tools into our systems, often without knowing what data is being captured, where it's going, how long it's stored, and whether it's protected with strong encryption. We're just at the beginning of understanding the risks of AI in enterprise environments.

As organizations rush to adopt AI-powered platforms, they inherit a growing black box attack surface that is difficult to quantify, hard to test, and potentially ripe for abuse. The pace of innovation is outstripping our ability to secure it. Visibility will be crucial in mitigating these risks in the future.

The Problem with Patching

If humans are truly the weakest link in cybersecurity, then unpatched vulnerabilities are a square second place. Timely patching is essential to stay ahead of threat actors. Once a vulnerability is disclosed and a patch is released, attackers often race to reverse-engineer the fix, aiming to exploit systems before organizations apply the update.

However, organizations often hesitate to instantly deploy patches due to concerns about stability and potential disruptions. Nothing ruins a weekend more than a routine security patch that takes resources offline—or worse. Concern over the instability of Microsoft patches isn't unfounded. 2024 saw several Microsoft patches break more than they fixed, along with Microsoft updates that rolled systems back to vulnerable states, breaking critical features or disabling auto update mechanisms altogether.

Across the industry, patching SLAs have been accelerated to 24 or 48 hours, but that condensed Agile timeline leaves little room for proper validation. As a result, some patches blow up production, and when that happens, trust in the entire patching process erodes, leaving organizations to choose between applying a critical security fix or risking a costly outage.

Preview builds that bricked features, including the auto-update system itself, have plagued enterprises with various degrees of problems and image build issues. As noted by recent history and the infamous CrowdStrike update incident of 2024, speeding updates and patches to market without proper testing and validation can have devastating consequences.

Microsoft's reputation for patch quality has wavered before. In 2025, Microsoft should increase focus on patch quality and stability to rebuild trust and encourage faster adoption for the entire vulnerability and patch management lifecycle. Because in cybersecurity, shipping a patch quickly is not the same as shipping it correctly.

Practical Steps to Reduce Microsoft Vulnerability-Based Risks

Mitigating Microsoft vulnerabilities in today's hybrid, fast-evolving threat landscape demands a strategic, multilayered defense. Here are the most effective actions organizations can take now to reduce risk and strengthen cyber resilience:

• Implement Least Privilege and Zero Trust Controls Across the Stack - Removing local admin rights and enforcing least privilege consistently across users, systems, and applications can remediate or mitigate up to 75% of Microsoft critical vulnerabilities. It's one of the most effective ways to reduce lateral movement and privilege escalation risk. Modern Windows finally supports least privilege by design, but the third-party programs still sitting on top often don't. That's where Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools must step in to fill the gaps. Use PAM to discover and control privileged accounts, reduce standing access, and manage indirect Paths to Privilege™. PAM also provides oversight of sensitive systems.
• Adopt a Tailored Vulnerability Management Strategy - Go beyond blanket patching. Prioritize vulnerabilities based on your environment's context, threat models, and business impact. Patching everything equally isn't efficient when you need to focus on what is exploitable for you now.
• Secure Remote Access Pathways - Exposed RDP, outdated VPNs, and unmanaged vendor access are top ransomware entry points. Segment, monitor, and secure all remote access with strong authentication and session controls, especially for privileged users and from untrusted sources like contractors or third parties.
• Integrate Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) - Visibility is everything. You can't fix what you can't see, especially with third-party and SaaS systems where vulnerability insight is minimal or nonexistent. An ITDR solution gives visibility into identity-related risks across AD, Entra ID, Okta, Ping, SailPoint, and more. It enables rapid response to identity misuse, privilege abuse, and lateral movement. These are all common tactics in real-world Microsoft exploit chains.

Conclusion

This year's Microsoft vulnerability data shows encouraging signs: fewer critical flaws, better disclosure practices, and progress in areas that once posed persistent risks. But one thing remains unchanged: you own your security posture. Microsoft can build more secure software, but it's up to each organization to decide how it's deployed, maintained, and protected.

A strategy grounded in least privilege, zero trust, and proactive identity security can dramatically reduce your risk, even before a patch is available. Add to that smart vulnerability prioritization, secure remote access, and strong PAM controls, and you're not just responding to threats; you're staying ahead of them.

And my top advice for 2025: gain visibility across your environment, especially for legacy and end-of-life systems. In addition, isolate anything that can't be patched. October 2025 is a huge date: that's when Windows 10 goes end-of-life, unless you're paying for extended support. That's the next big spike in risk, and it's coming fast.

There may never be a silver bullet for Microsoft vulnerabilities, but there's something close: layered security that works in the real world, one patch—and one privilege—at a time.

About the Author: Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust. As the Chief Security Advisor, Morey is the lead identity and technical evangelist at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored four books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, Identity Attack Vectors, and Cloud Attack Vectors. Morey has previously served as BeyondTrust's Chief Security Officer, Chief Technology, and Vice President of Product Management during his nearly 12-year tenure. In 2020, Morey was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board, assisting the corporate community with identity security best practices. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the acquisition of eEye Digital Security, where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer, since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. Morey earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.