Step 1Wednesday loop
Read the Tuesday signal
Pull vendor advisories, exploited-in-the-wild notes, severity, affected products, mitigations, and owner hints.
Exploit Wednesday
Exploit Wednesday: what defenders do after Patch Tuesday.
Patch Tuesday releases the signal. Exploit Wednesday is the response window. Use this page as a weekly vulnerability-management ritual for exposure triage, AI-assisted analysis, detection, patching, and concise leadership updates.
Weekly ritual
Six steps for the Wednesday response loop.
Step 2Wednesday loop
Rank Wednesday exposure
Prioritize internet-facing systems, identity, VPN, firewall, email, developer platforms, cloud control planes, and business-critical services.
Step 3Wednesday loop
Query real assets
Use endpoint, cloud, vulnerability, CMDB, SIEM, repository, container, and SaaS data to separate exposed, mitigated, unknown, and not affected.
Step 4Wednesday loop
Patch or contain
Assign owners and deadlines. If patching cannot happen immediately, add compensating controls, isolation, detection, or explicit risk acceptance.
Step 5Wednesday loop
Watch for exploitation
Create detection checks for known exploitation paths, authentication anomalies, suspicious scanning, new processes, and vulnerable product telemetry.
Step 6Wednesday loop
Brief with evidence
Send one concise update: what changed, what is exposed, what is fixed, what remains, who owns it, and when the next evidence update lands.
Make it repeatable
Turn Exploit Wednesday into a weekly team habit.
Use the full article, the Wednesday Brief, and the incident map to keep vulnerability response visible, owned, and evidence-based.