Microsoft Security in 2025: Top Vulnerability Trends from the BeyondTrust Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report

Another year, another Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report! Our 12^th annual edition offers an interesting mix of ups and downs. We’re seeing fewer critical vulnerabilities, but the highest number of overall vulnerabilities since this report began. We’re optimistic about Microsoft’s headway as they enter the third year of their Secure Future Initiative, but hesitate due to a few ongoing issues—like the persistence of legacy code in Windows 11, the resurgence of critical vulnerabilities in Edge, and the fact that Elevation of Privilege and Remote Code Execution categories continue to dominate.

After over a decade of compiling this data, we also have the unique opportunity to look back at what has changed long-term—and then look ahead and hypothesize what the future holds. This edition of the report does both, looking at what 5-year trends tell us about vulnerabilities by category and product, as well as considering what Microsoft’s ongoing security initiative and the present threat landscape could mean for our future.

In this blog, we’ll break down some of the most noteworthy findings from the report, explore key trends in Microsoft’s vulnerability landscape, and share actionable insights to help security teams fortify their defenses against emerging threats.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the data from this year’s Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report.

The 2025 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report offers several breakdowns of data on vulnerabilities, divided by category and by product. As with previous years, we have also included commentaries from several industry experts, including Anton Chuvakin, Henrik Parkkinen, Kip Boyle, Sami Laiho, and Paula Januszkiewicz. In addition, we offer practical next steps for responding to these realities of today’s Windows environments, prove why the fundamentals still matter in many ways, and explain how to leverage multilayered least privilege for a stronger defense, now and in the future.

The quality of security patches can be…patchy

We also took some time in this year’s report to cover what we’ve observed when it comes to patching Microsoft security issues. While Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative has brought significant, positive change, it has also increased the pressure to ship fixes quickly. Because of this, we saw a few examples of patches that ended up breaking systems and causing downtime. The moral of the story: patches alone aren’t an adequate security strategy.

Time will reveal the success of Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative

In addition, this report highlighted the changes that Microsoft has made as part of its Secure Future Initiative. They mentioned significant headway in their September 2024 progress report, including:

• The elimination of 730,000 unused apps and 5.75 million inactive tenants
• The implementation of phishing-resistant credentials in production environments
• The launch of the Microsoft Security Academy for their own employees
• And more.

There’s a possibility that we see a decrease in critical vulnerabilities because of this relatively new program, but only time will tell.

Multilayered least privilege as a response to Microsoft’s growing vulnerabilities

This year’s edition of the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report also explored the concept of multilayered least privilege: a defense-in-depth strategy that goes beyond a simple patch or fix. The following strategies create an excellent foundation for a multilayered approach:

1. Tailor vulnerability management to your own environment by understanding the context of your own organization’s threat models to better prioritize patches, controls, and other security activities.
2. Implement least privilege and zero trust controls across your stack with a cohesive approach across every area in your organization: network, identities, accounts, endpoints, applications, sessions, clouds, on-premises environments, etc.
3. Secure remote access pathways by replacing or augmenting traditional technologies such as RDP and VPNs and enforcing authentication and session monitoring to detect misuse early.
4. Implement identity threat detection and response (ITDR) to gain a complete understanding into the True Privilege™ of all identities, enabling you to see the attack paths within your environment and identify which steps are needed to improve identity security posture.
5. Prepare for the next frontier of threats by taking a holistic look at your hybrid environment and understanding the possible privilege escalation pathways that could be exposed if a vulnerability were exploited or an identity compromised.