2026-04-08 01:02:44
Hackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.
Microsoft said in a blog post today it identified more than 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices that were caught up in a stealthy but remarkably simple spying network built by a Russia-backed threat actor known as “Forest Blizzard.”
How targeted DNS requests were redirected at the router. Image: Black Lotus Labs.
Also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard is attributed to the military intelligence units within Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). APT 28 famously compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
Researchers at Black Lotus Labs, a security division of the Internet backbone provider Lumen, found that at the peak of its activity in December 2025, Forest Blizzard’s surveillance dragnet ensnared more than 18,000 Internet routers that were mostly unsupported, end-of-life routers, or else far behind on security updates. A new report from Lumen says the hackers primarily targeted government agencies—including ministries of foreign affairs, law enforcement, and third-party email providers.
Black Lotus Security Engineer Ryan English said the GRU hackers did not need to install malware on the targeted routers, which were mainly older Mikrotik and TP-Link devices marketed to the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Instead, they used known vulnerabilities to modify the Domain Name System (DNS) settings of the routers to include DNS servers controlled by the hackers.
As the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) notes in a new advisory detailing how Russian cyber actors have been compromising routers, DNS is what allows individuals to reach websites by typing familiar addresses, instead of associated IP addresses. In a DNS hijacking attack, bad actors interfere with this process to covertly send users to malicious websites designed to steal login details or other sensitive information.
English said the routers attacked by Forest Blizzard were reconfigured to use DNS servers that pointed to a handful of virtual private servers controlled by the attackers. Importantly, the attackers could then propagate their malicious DNS settings to all users on the local network, and from that point forward intercept any OAuth authentication tokens transmitted by those users.
DNS hijacking through router compromise. Image: Microsoft.
Because those tokens are typically transmitted only after the user has successfully logged in and gone through multi-factor authentication, the attackers could gain direct access to victim accounts without ever having to phish each user’s credentials and/or one-time codes.
“Everyone is looking for some sophisticated malware to drop something on your mobile devices or something,” English said. “These guys didn’t use malware. They did this in an old-school, graybeard way that isn’t really sexy but it gets the job done.”
Microsoft refers to the Forest Blizzard activity as using DNS hijacking “to support post-compromise adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks on Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections against Microsoft Outlook on the web domains.” The software giant said while targeting SOHO devices isn’t a new tactic, this is the first time Microsoft has seen Forest Blizzard using “DNS hijacking at scale to support AiTM of TLS connections after exploiting edge devices.”
Black Lotus Labs engineer Danny Adamitis said it will be interesting to see how Forest Blizzard reacts to today’s flurry of attention to their espionage operation, noting that the group immediately switched up its tactics in response to a similar NCSC report (PDF) in August 2025. At the time, Forest Blizzard was using malware to control a far more targeted and smaller group of compromised routers. But Adamitis said the day after the NCSC report, the group quickly ditched the malware approach in favor of mass-altering the DNS settings on thousands of vulnerable routers.
“Before the last NCSC report came out they used this capability in very limited instances,” Adamitis told KrebsOnSecurity. “After the report was released they implemented the capability in a more systemic fashion and used it to target everything that was vulnerable.”
TP-Link was among the router makers facing a complete ban in the United States. But on March 23, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a much broader approach, announcing it would no longer certify consumer-grade Internet routers that are produced outside of the United States.
The FCC warned that foreign-made routers had become an untenable national security threat, and that poorly-secured routers present “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure and directly harm U.S. persons.”
Experts have countered that few new consumer-grade routers would be available for purchase under this new FCC policy (besides maybe Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet routers, which are produced in Texas). The FCC says router makers can apply for a special “conditional approval” from the Department of War or Department of Homeland Security, and that the new policy does not affect any previously-purchased consumer-grade routers.
2026-04-06 10:07:17
An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.
Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian — 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk — extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage.
Daniil Maksimovich SHCHUKIN, a.k.a. UNKN, and Anatoly Sergeevitsch Karvchuk, alleged leaders of the GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups.
Germany’s BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion — charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data.
Shchukin’s name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang’s activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency.
The GandCrab ransomware affiliate program first surfaced in January 2018, and paid enterprising hackers huge shares of the profits just for hacking into user accounts at major corporations. The GandCrab team would then try to expand that access, often siphoning vast amounts of sensitive and internal documents in the process. The malware’s curators shipped five major revisions to the GandCrab code, each corresponding with sneaky new features and bug fixes aimed at thwarting the efforts of computer security firms to stymie the spread of the malware.
On May 31, 2019, the GandCrab team announced the group was shutting down after extorting more than $2 billion from victims. “We are a living proof that you can do evil and get off scot-free,” GandCrab’s farewell address famously quipped. “We have proved that one can make a lifetime of money in one year. We have proved that you can become number one by general admission, not in your own conceit.”
The REvil ransomware affiliate program materialized around the same as GandCrab’s demise, fronted by a user named UNKNOWN who announced on a Russian cybercrime forum that he’d deposited $1 million in the forum’s escrow to show he meant business. By this time, many cybersecurity experts had concluded REvil was little more than a reorganization of GandCrab.
UNKNOWN also gave an interview to Dmitry Smilyanets, a former malicious hacker hired by Recorded Future, wherein UNKNOWN described a rags-to-riches tale unencumbered by ethics and morals.
“As a child, I scrounged through the trash heaps and smoked cigarette butts,” UNKNOWN told Recorded Future. “I walked 10 km one way to the school. I wore the same clothes for six months. In my youth, in a communal apartment, I didn’t eat for two or even three days. Now I am a millionaire.”
As described in The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, UNKNOWN and REvil reinvested significant earnings into improving their success and mirroring practices of legitimate businesses. The authors wrote:
“Just as a real-world manufacturer might hire other companies to handle logistics or web design, ransomware developers increasingly outsourced tasks beyond their purview, focusing instead on improving the quality of their ransomware. The higher quality ransomware—which, in many cases, the Hunting Team could not break—resulted in more and higher pay-outs from victims. The monumental payments enabled gangs to reinvest in their enterprises. They hired more specialists, and their success accelerated.”
“Criminals raced to join the booming ransomware economy. Underworld ancillary service providers sprouted or pivoted from other criminal work to meet developers’ demand for customized support. Partnering with gangs like GandCrab, ‘cryptor’ providers ensured ransomware could not be detected by standard anti-malware scanners. ‘Initial access brokerages’ specialized in stealing credentials and finding vulnerabilities in target networks, selling that access to ransomware operators and affiliates. Bitcoin “tumblers” offered discounts to gangs that used them as a preferred vendor for laundering ransom payments. Some contractors were open to working with any gang, while others entered exclusive partnerships.”
REvil would evolve into a feared “big-game-hunting” machine capable of extracting hefty extortion payments from victims, largely going after organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenues and fat new cyber insurance policies that were known to pay out.
Over the July 4, 2021 weekend in the United States, REvil hacked into and extorted Kaseya, a company that handled IT operations for more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. The FBI would later announce they’d infiltrated the ransomware group’s servers prior to the Kaseya hack but couldn’t tip their hand at the time. REvil never recovered from that core compromise, or from the FBI’s release of a free decryption key for REvil victims who couldn’t or didn’t pay.
Shchukin is from Krasnodar, Russia and is thought to reside there, the BKA said.
“Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia,” the BKA advised. “Travel behaviour cannot be ruled out.”
There is little that connects Shchukin to UNKNOWN’s various accounts on the Russian crime forums. But a review of the Russian crime forums indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows there is plenty connecting Shchukin to a hacker identity called “Ger0in” who operated large botnets and sold “installs” — allowing other cybercriminals to rapidly deploy malware of their choice to thousands of PCs in one go. However, Ger0in was only active between 2010 and 2011, well before UNKNOWN’s appearance as the REvil front man.
A review of the mugshots released by the BKA at the image comparison site Pimeyes found a match on this birthday celebration from 2023, which features a young man named Daniel wearing the same fancy watch as in the BKA photos.
Images from Daniil Shchukin’s birthday party celebration in Krasnodar in 2023.
Update, April 6, 12:06 p.m. ET: A reader forwarded this English-dubbed audio recording from the a ccc.de (37C3) conference talk in Germany from 2023 that previously outed Shchukin as the REvil leader (Shchuckin is mentioned at around 24:25).
2026-03-23 23:43:04
A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.
Experts say the wiper campaign against Iran materialized this past weekend and came from a relatively new cybercrime group known as TeamPCP. In December 2025, the group began compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm that went after exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Redis servers, and the React2Shell vulnerability. TeamPCP then attempted to move laterally through victim networks, siphoning authentication credentials and extorting victims over Telegram.
A snippet of the malicious CanisterWorm that seeks out and destroys data on systems that match Iran’s timezone or have Farsi as the default language. Image: Aikido.dev.
In a profile of TeamPCP published in January, the security firm Flare said the group weaponizes exposed control planes rather than exploiting endpoints, predominantly targeting cloud infrastructure over end-user devices, with Azure (61%) and AWS (36%) accounting for 97% of compromised servers.
“TeamPCP’s strength does not come from novel exploits or original malware, but from the large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques,” Flare’s Assaf Morag wrote. “The group industrializes existing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and recycled tooling into a cloud-native exploitation platform that turns exposed infrastructure into a self-propagating criminal ecosystem.”
On March 19, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack against the vulnerability scanner Trivy from Aqua Security, injecting credential-stealing malware into official releases on GitHub actions. Aqua Security said it has since removed the harmful files, but the security firm Wiz notes the attackers were able to publish malicious versions that snarfed SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes tokens and cryptocurrency wallets from users.
Over the weekend, the same technical infrastructure TeamPCP used in the Trivy attack was leveraged to deploy a new malicious payload which executes a wiper attack if the user’s timezone and locale are determined to correspond to Iran, said Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido. In a blog post published on Sunday, Eriksen said if the wiper component detects that the victim is in Iran and has access to a Kubernetes cluster, it will destroy data on every node in that cluster.
“If it doesn’t it will just wipe the local machine,” Eriksen told KrebsOnSecurity.
Image: Aikido.dev.
Aikido refers to TeamPCP’s infrastructure as “CanisterWorm” because the group orchestrates their campaigns using an Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) canister — a system of tamperproof, blockchain-based “smart contracts” that combine both code and data. ICP canisters can serve Web content directly to visitors, and their distributed architecture makes them resistant to takedown attempts. These canisters will remain reachable so long as their operators continue to pay virtual currency fees to keep them online.
Eriksen said the people behind TeamPCP are bragging about their exploits in a group on Telegram and claim to have used the worm to steal vast amounts of sensitive data from major companies, including a large multinational pharmaceutical firm.
“When they compromised Aqua a second time, they took a lot of GitHub accounts and started spamming these with junk messages,” Eriksen said. “It was almost like they were just showing off how much access they had. Clearly, they have an entire stash of these credentials, and what we’ve seen so far is probably a small sample of what they have.”
Security experts say the spammed GitHub messages could be a way for TeamPCP to ensure that any code packages tainted with their malware will remain prominent in GitHub searches. In a newsletter published today titled GitHub is Starting to Have a Real Malware Problem, Risky Business reporter Catalin Cimpanu writes that attackers often are seen pushing meaningless commits to their repos or using online services that sell GitHub stars and “likes” to keep malicious packages at the top of the GitHub search page.
This weekend’s outbreak is the second major supply chain attack involving Trivy in as many months. At the end of February, Trivy was hit as part of an automated threat called HackerBot-Claw, which mass exploited misconfigured workflows in GitHub Actions to steal authentication tokens.
Eriksen said it appears TeamPCP used access gained in the first attack on Aqua Security to perpetrate this weekend’s mischief. But he said there is no reliable way to tell whether TeamPCP’s wiper actually succeeded in trashing any data from victim systems, and that the malicious payload was only active for a short time over the weekend.
“They’ve been taking [the malicious code] up and down, rapidly changing it adding new features,” Eriksen said, noting that when the malicious canister wasn’t serving up malware downloads it was pointing visitors to a Rick Roll video on YouTube.
“It’s a little all over the place, and there’s a chance this whole Iran thing is just their way of getting attention,” Eriksen said. “I feel like these people are really playing this Chaotic Evil role here.”
Cimpanu observed that supply chain attacks have increased in frequency of late as threat actors begin to grasp just how efficient they can be, and his post documents an alarming number of these incidents since 2024.
“While security firms appear to be doing a good job spotting this, we’re also gonna need GitHub’s security team to step up,” Cimpanu wrote. “Unfortunately, on a platform designed to copy (fork) a project and create new versions of it (clones), spotting malicious additions to clones of legitimate repos might be quite the engineering problem to fix.”
Update, 2:40 p.m. ET: Wiz is reporting that TeamPCP also pushed credential stealing malware to the KICS vulnerability scanner from Checkmarx, and that the scanner’s GitHub Action was compromised between 12:58 and 16:50 UTC today (March 23rd).
2026-03-20 08:49:19
The U.S. Justice Department joined authorities in Canada and Germany in dismantling the online infrastructure behind four highly disruptive botnets that compromised more than three million Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as routers and web cameras. The feds say the four botnets — named Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad — are responsible for a series of recent record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any target offline.
Image: Shutterstock, @Elzicon.
The Justice Department said the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s (DoDIG) Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) executed seizure warrants targeting multiple U.S.-registered domains, virtual servers, and other infrastructure involved in DDoS attacks against Internet addresses owned by the DoD.
The government alleges the unnamed people in control of the four botnets used their crime machines to launch hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, often demanding extortion payments from victims. Some victims reported tens of thousands of dollars in losses and remediation expenses.
The oldest of the botnets — Aisuru — issued more than 200,000 attacks commands, while JackSkid hurled at least 90,000 attacks. Kimwolf issued more than 25,000 attack commands, the government said, while Mossad was blamed for roughy 1,000 digital sieges.
The DOJ said the law enforcement action was designed to prevent further infection to victim devices and to limit or eliminate the ability of the botnets to launch future attacks. The case is being investigated by the DCIS with help from the FBI’s field office in Anchorage, Alaska, and the DOJ’s statement credits nearly two dozen technology companies with assisting in the operation.
“By working closely with DCIS and our international law enforcement partners, we collectively identified and disrupted criminal infrastructure used to carry out large-scale DDoS attacks,” said Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Day of the FBI Anchorage Field Office.
Aisuru emerged in late 2024, and by mid-2025 it was launching record-breaking DDoS attacks as it rapidly infected new IoT devices. In October 2025, Aisuru was used to seed Kimwolf, an Aisuru variant which introduced a novel spreading mechanism that allowed the botnet to infect devices hidden behind the protection of the user’s internal network.
On January 2, 2026, the security firm Synthient publicly disclosed the vulnerability Kimwolf was using to propagate so quickly. That disclosure helped curtail Kimwolf’s spread somewhat, but since then several other IoT botnets have emerged that effectively copy Kimwolf’s spreading methods while competing for the same pool of vulnerable devices. According to the DOJ, the JackSkid botnet also sought out systems on internal networks just like Kimwolf.
The DOJ said its disruption of the four botnets coincided with “law enforcement actions” conducted in Canada and Germany targeting individuals who allegedly operated those botnets, although no further details were available on the suspected operators.
In late February, KrebsOnSecurity identified a 22-year-old Canadian man as a core operator of the Kimwolf botnet. Multiple sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the other prime suspect is a 15-year-old living in Germany.
2026-03-12 00:20:13
A hacktivist group with links to Iran’s intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker’s largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker’s main U.S. headquarters says the company is currently experiencing a building emergency.
Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Stryker [NYSE:SYK] is a medical and surgical equipment maker that reported $25 billion in global sales last year. In a lengthy statement posted to Telegram, a hacktivist group known as Handala (a.k.a. Handala Hack Team) claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down after the group erased data from more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices.
A manifesto posted by the Iran-backed hacktivist group Handala, claiming a mass data-wiping attack against medical technology maker Stryker.
“All the acquired data is now in the hands of the free people of the world, ready to be used for the true advancement of humanity and the exposure of injustice and corruption,” a portion of the Handala statement reads.
The group said the wiper attack was in retaliation for a Feb. 28 missile strike that hit an Iranian school and killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The New York Times reports today that an ongoing military investigation has determined the United States is responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike.
Handala was one of several hacker groups recently profiled by Palo Alto Networks, which links it to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Palo Alto says Handala surfaced in late 2023 and is assessed as one of several online personas maintained by Void Manticore, a MOIS-affiliated actor.
Stryker’s website says the company has 56,000 employees in 61 countries. A phone call placed Wednesday morning to the media line at Stryker’s Michigan headquarters sent this author to a voicemail message that stated, “We are currently experiencing a building emergency. Please try your call again later.”
A report Wednesday morning from the Irish Examiner said Stryker staff are now communicating via WhatsApp for any updates on when they can return to work. The story quoted an unnamed employee saying anything connected to the network is down, and that “anyone with Microsoft Outlook on their personal phones had their devices wiped.”
“Multiple sources have said that systems in the Cork headquarters have been ‘shut down’ and that Stryker devices held by employees have been wiped out,” the Examiner reported. “The login pages coming up on these devices have been defaced with the Handala logo.”
Wiper attacks usually involve malicious software designed to overwrite any existing data on infected devices. But a trusted source with knowledge of the attack who spoke on condition of anonymity told KrebsOnSecurity the perpetrators in this case appear to have used a Microsoft service called Microsoft Intune to issue a ‘remote wipe’ command against all connected devices.
Intune is a cloud-based solution built for IT teams to enforce security and data compliance policies, and it provides a single, web-based administrative console to monitor and control devices regardless of location. The Intune connection is supported by this Reddit discussion on the Stryker outage, where several users who claimed to be Stryker employees said they were told to uninstall Intune urgently.
Palo Alto says Handala’s hack-and-leak activity is primarily focused on Israel, with occasional targeting outside that scope when it serves a specific agenda. The security firm said Handala also has taken credit for recent attacks against fuel systems in Jordan and an Israeli energy exploration company.
“Recent observed activities are opportunistic and ‘quick and dirty,’ with a noticeable focus on supply-chain footholds (e.g., IT/service providers) to reach downstream victims, followed by ‘proof’ posts to amplify credibility and intimidate targets,” Palo Alto researchers wrote.
The Handala manifesto posted to Telegram referred to Stryker as a “Zionist-rooted corporation,” which may be a reference to the company’s 2019 acquisition of the Israeli company OrthoSpace.
Stryker is a major supplier of medical devices, and the ongoing attack is already affecting healthcare providers. One healthcare professional at a major university medical system in the United States told KrebsOnSecurity they are currently unable to order surgical supplies that they normally source through Stryker.
“This is a real-world supply chain attack,” the expert said, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Pretty much every hospital in the U.S. that performs surgeries uses their supplies.”
John Riggi, national advisor for the American Hospital Association (AHA), said the AHA is not aware of any supply-chain disruptions as of yet.
“We are aware of reports of the cyber attack against Stryker and are actively exchanging information with the hospital field and the federal government to understand the nature of the threat and assess any impact to hospital operations,” Riggi said in an email. “As of this time, we are not aware of any direct impacts or disruptions to U.S. hospitals as a result of this attack. That may change as hospitals evaluate services, technology and supply chain related to Stryker and if the duration of the attack extends.”
According to a March 11 memo from the state of Maryland’s Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, Stryker indicated that some of their computer systems have been impacted by a “global network disruption.” The memo indicates that in response to the attack, a number of hospitals have opted to disconnect from Stryker’s various online services, including LifeNet, which allows paramedics to transmit EKGs to emergency physicians so that heart attack patients can expedite their treatment when they arrive at the hospital.
“As a precaution, some hospitals have temporarily suspended their connection to Stryker systems, including LIFENET, while others have maintained the connection,” wrote Timothy Chizmar, the state’s EMS medical director. “The Maryland Medical Protocols for EMS requires ECG transmission for patients with acute coronary syndrome (or STEMI). However, if you are unable to transmit a 12 Lead ECG to a receiving hospital, you should initiate radio consultation and describe the findings on the ECG.”
This is a developing story. Updates will be noted with a timestamp.
Update, 2:54 p.m. ET: Added comment from Riggi and perspectives on this attack’s potential to turn into a supply-chain problem for the healthcare system.
Update, Mar. 12, 7:59 a.m. ET: Added information about the outage affecting Stryker’s online services.
2026-03-11 08:32:51
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 or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.
“Although Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,” McCarthy said. “This development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.”
Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.
Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities — some of them critical in severity — in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.
For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this month’s patches.