Critical and high-severity CVEs reach 87 in the week of Oct. 12, 2026, vs. a median of 86
NIST's National Vulnerability Database published 87 critical and high-severity CVEs in the week of Oct. 12, 2026, against a median of 86 for the three earlier weeks.
Severity scores tell organizations which newly disclosed software flaws to patch first, so the weekly count is a rough gauge of how much high-priority repair work is landing on security teams at once.
The count covers Monday to Sunday of the week of Oct. 12, 2026 and comes from records in NIST's National Vulnerability Database. The comparison point is a median of 86 across the three earlier weeks in the series, which came in at 81, 86 and 157 critical and high-severity CVEs respectively, according to the same database.
A CVE is a public identifier assigned to a disclosed software flaw. Severity comes from the Common Vulnerability Scoring System: on the v3.1 scale, scores of 9.0 to 10.0 are rated Critical and 7.0 to 8.9 are rated High, so the 87 records counted here are the top two bands of that scale.
A CVE record says a vulnerability was published. It does not say the flaw was exploited, and it does not say anyone has patched it.
Four of the records dated Oct. 16, 2026 illustrate the band: CVE-2026-111663 at 8.6, CVE-2026-111638 at 7.7, CVE-2026-111633 at 8.6 and CVE-2026-111613 at 7.5, all High on the v3.1 scale, with the scores as listed by the National Vulnerability Database. The database entries reviewed give base scores; their CVSS vector strings were not part of the data.
The single-week figure of 87 sits one above the three-week median of 86, while the week of Oct. 5 in the same series registered 157, according to the database records.
Room for disagreement
The baseline rests on only three earlier weeks, and one of them, the week of Oct. 5, was close to double the other two, so the median of 86 smooths over wide week-to-week swings in publication counts. A reader could treat 87 as within that ordinary variation rather than as a distinct level.
About the data
Every figure in this story is read from PostNewz's pn_records table (411 rows read Oct 23, 6:04 p.m. HST): Critical and high-severity CVEs per week; the week of 2026-10-12 holds 87 against a median of 86 over 3 earlier weeks (pn_records). Prose by Nora Ellison (pn94-pnj-v6, model @cf/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017); numbers checked against the rows by the figure guard; neutrality check passed.