In 1999 the CVE list started with 321 vulnerabilities. For the whole year. In September 2026 there were 14,943. In one month.
Quick context. CVE is the public catalogue of known security holes in software. Every time someone finds one, it gets an ID, a bit like a number plate, so vendors, researchers and IT teams all know they're talking about the same bug. If your Windows, your router or your online store needs an urgent patch, there's a CVE behind it.
So the chart is basically a count of new holes in the software we all run.
For most of those 27 years, the flaws that really mattered were so rare we gave them names. And logos. Even websites.
In 2014, the year of Heartbleed, under 1,000 CVEs came out a month. Only 14 got a name all year.
The classics:
2014. Heartbleed. One bug in OpenSSL and a huge chunk of the internet resetting passwords.
2017. WannaCry. UK hospitals cancelling operations.
2021. Log4Shell. A logging library nobody knew they had, inside everything.
2024. The xz backdoor. Caught by one engineer because SSH logins felt half a second slow.
One big name every year or two. Each with its war room and its board meeting.
Then April 2026. Anthropic's Mythos finds a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Since then, the curve in the image.
Just the critical stuff since September:
🦠 Microsoft breaks its Patch Tuesday record with nearly 1,000 fixes. One of them: take over Exchange with a single email carrying a Visio file.
🦠 MikroTik routers that, in some setups, let you log in over SSH without the private key.
🦠 October, Microsoft again. 1,413 fixes. More than in all of 2025.
🦠 eMudhra, a certificate authority. Eight signing keys so weak that one was literally the number 4. curl, Python, Node, Go and Java all accepted a forged certificate for Stripe's API.
🦠 And this week, PHP2Shell. Remote code execution in PHP itself, every version since 5.4, over 22 million exposed instances. WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop. All PHP.
Only two months. Vulnerabilities used to be earthquakes and now they're weather.
In your company, how many days do you need between a critical patch and production? If nobody knows the number, that's your answer.
P.S. The dotted line at the end is October's projection. Around 17,000.