Security & IT News

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing “zero-day” flaws this month (compared to February’s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday. Image: Shutterstock, @nwz. Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions. “This isn’t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett said. “The CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.” The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127 , a vulnerability in applications running on .NET . Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot. It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane. Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated “exploitation more likely” — across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include: – CVE-2026-24291 : Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8) – CVE-2026-24294 : Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8) – CVE-2026-24289 : High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8) – CVE-2026-25187 : Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8). Ben McCarthy , lead cyber security engineer at Immersive , called attention to CVE-2026-21536 , a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says it’s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW , a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent. XBOW has consistently ranked at o

CVSSv3 Score: 6.7 An Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection') vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiSandbox Cloud WEB UI may allow a privileged attacker with super-admin profile and CLI access to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted HTTP requests. Revised on 2026-03-10 00:00:00

CVSSv3 Score: 7.0 A Stack-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability [CWE-121] in FortiManager fgtupdates service may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized commands via crafted requests, if the service is enabled. The success of the attack depends on the ability to bypass the stack protection mechanisms. Revised on 2026-03-10 00:00:00

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for a whopping six “zero-day” vulnerabilities that attackers are already exploiting in the wild. Zero-day #1 this month is CVE-2026-21510 , a security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows Shell wherein a single click on a malicious link can quietly bypass Windows protections and run attacker-controlled content without warning or consent dialogs. CVE-2026-21510 affects all currently supported versions of Windows. The zero-day flaw CVE-2026-21513 is a security bypass bug targeting MSHTML , the proprietary engine of the default Web browser in Windows. CVE-2026-21514 is a related security feature bypass in Microsoft Word. The zero-day CVE-2026-21533 allows local attackers to elevate their user privileges to “SYSTEM” level access in Windows Remote Desktop Services . CVE-2026-21519 is a zero-day elevation of privilege flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a user’s screen. Microsoft fixed a different zero-day in DWM just last month . The sixth zero-day is CVE-2026-21525 , a potentially disruptive denial-of-service vulnerability in the Windows Remote Access Connection Manager , the service responsible for maintaining VPN connections to corporate networks. Chris Goettl at Ivanti reminds us Microsoft has issued several out-of-band security updates since January’s Patch Tuesday. On January 17, Microsoft pushed a fix that resolved a credential prompt failure when attempting remote desktop or remote application connections. On January 26, Microsoft patched a zero-day security feature bypass vulnerability ( CVE-2026-21509 ) in Microsoft Office . Kev Breen at Immersive notes that this month’s Patch Tuesday includes several fixes for remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting GitHub Copilot and multiple integrated development environments (IDEs), including VS Code , Visual Studio , and JetBrains products. The relevant CVEs are CVE-2026-21516 , CVE-2026-21523 , and CVE-2026-21256 . Breen said the AI vulnerabilities Microsoft patched this month stem from a command injection flaw that can be triggered through prompt injection, or tricking the AI agent into doing something it shouldn’t — like executing malicious code or commands. “Developers are high-value targets for threat actors, as they often have access to sensitive data such as API keys and secrets that function as keys to critical infrastructure, including privileged AWS or Azure API keys,” Breen said. “When organizations enable developers and automation pipelines to use LLMs and agentic AI, a malicious prompt can have significant impact. This does not mean organizations should stop using AI. It does mean developers should understand the risks, teams should clearly identify which systems and workflows have access to AI agents, and least-privile

CVSSv3 Score: 5.3 An Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor vulnerability [CWE-200] in FortiOS SSL-VPN may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to bypass the patch developed for the symbolic link persistency mechanism observed in some post-exploit cases, via crafted HTTP requests. An attacker would need first to have compromised the product via another vulnerability, at filesystem level. Revised on 2026-03-12 00:00:00