Patch Tuesday August 2025

Patch Tuesday August 2025: all the smoking hot security patch news you need for your small business. If you’re not sure what you should be patching or why, read Patch Primer for Small Business. Patch Tuesday is the day most software vendors release their monthly software patches.

Android Phone updates

Google patched two critical Android vulnerabilities this month and patched four other vulnerabilities. If you have a Google phone you should patch immediately. If you have an Android phone from another manufacturer (like Samsung or Motorola), you have to wait for the manufacturer to get around to testing and sending out the updates.

More information about these updates and how to install them here.

Creative Suite Cloudy

Adobe released security patches for almost all of the Creative Cloud Suite. Everything except Adobe Acrobat. Adobe hasn’t updated Acrobat since June which is unusual.

More details on the Adobe Creative Cloud suite updates here.

Dell Broadcom chips vulnerability

Dell reports they have notified their customers about 5 critical security flaws in Broadcom chips used in more than 100 models of Dell laptop computers. The Broadcom chip affected, the Broadcom BCM5820X, is used with Point of Sale (POS) terminals, PC client security, and authentication dongles and fobs plus secure boot.

Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to steal passwords, fingerprint identification, access secure data and take over the computer.

If you have an affected Dell laptop, you need to make sure to run firmware updates from the Dell. If you’re not sure if you have already received the update, go the Dell.com/support/drivers , enter your service tag or serial number and click Search. Then Allow Dell to automatically scan and auto detect drivers your laptop needs.

Microsoft Updates

I want to address the recent news about an Exchange email server hack first. As with last month’s SharePoint hack, this hack only affects businesses running their own physical stand alone server on their own premises. If you are using cloud based M365 exchange online you are not affected.

With M365 cloud software of any kind, you automatically receive the security updates for the software. Microsoft installs the security updates in the background even while you are using the software. This background install can cause some weird problems. If it’s Patch Tuesday and your Excel spreadsheet or Outlook start acting weird or slow, it’s probably the updates. First close and reopen the program to see if that resolves the problem. If that doesn’t work, you might have to restart the computer which normally installs the Windows updates as well.

You can pause Windows Updates or change other time settings via Windows Update page in Windows settings.

This August Patch Tuesday, Microsoft patched 111vulnerabilities including 17 classified as critical.

Be sure to schedule some time to install Windows updates this week.

Microsoft Update Mayhem

Updated August 21st: Microsoft released an emergency patch to fix one of two problems caused by August patches. The August Microsoft patch broke the recovery and reset function. Microsoft released a patch to fix that patch August 19th. More information on the recovery and reset function problem here.

Apple issues emergency security patch August 20th

Apple released an emergency security patch for iOS, iPadOS and Mac OS (Sequoia, Sonoma and Ventura) and older iPads.

Apple did not release many details. Basically hackers have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the ImageIO framework. Hackers create a booby trapped image which allows them spy on users and steal sensitive data.

More details on this important Apple update here.