Microsoft Corp. at present pushed safety updates to repair not less than 77 vulnerabilities in its Home windows working programs and different software program. There are not any urgent “zero-day” flaws this month (in comparison with February’s 5 zero-day deal with), however as regular some patches could deserve extra fast consideration from organizations utilizing Home windows. Listed below are just a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday.
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Two of the bugs Microsoft patched at present have been publicly disclosed beforehand. CVE-2026-21262 is a weak point that enables an attacker to raise their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.
“This isn’t simply any elevation of privilege vulnerability, both; the advisory notes that a licensed attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a community,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett mentioned. “The CVSS v3 base rating of 8.8 is just under the brink for vital severity, since low-level privileges are required. It might be a brave defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.”
The opposite publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in functions operating on .NET. Barnett mentioned the rapid influence of exploitation is probably going restricted to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for different varieties of assaults throughout a service reboot.
It might hardly be a correct Patch Tuesday with out not less than one vital Microsoft Workplace exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are each distant code execution flaws that may be triggered simply by viewing a booby-trapped message within the Preview Pane.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that simply over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of these, a half dozen have been rated “exploitation extra probably” — throughout Home windows Graphics Element, Home windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Home windows Kernel, Home windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These embody:
–CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments throughout the Home windows Accessibility Infrastructure to achieve SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication within the core SMB element (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24289: Excessive-severity reminiscence corruption and race situation flaw (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon course of weak point found by Google Challenge Zero (CVSS 7.8).
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber safety engineer at Immersive, known as consideration to CVE-2026-21536, a vital distant code execution bug in a element known as the Microsoft Gadgets Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the difficulty on their finish, and fixing it requires no motion on the a part of Home windows customers. However McCarthy says it’s notable as one of many first vulnerabilities recognized by an AI agent and formally acknowledged with a CVE attributed to the Home windows working system. It was found by XBOW, a completely autonomous AI penetration testing agent.
XBOW has persistently ranked at or close to the highest of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the previous 12 months. McCarthy mentioned CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI brokers can establish vital 9.8-rated vulnerabilities with out entry to supply code.
“Though Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift towards AI-driven discovery of complicated vulnerabilities at growing pace,” McCarthy mentioned. “This growth suggests AI-assisted vulnerability analysis will play a rising function within the safety panorama.”
Microsoft earlier supplied patches to deal with 9 browser vulnerabilities, which aren’t included within the Patch Tuesday depend above. As well as, Microsoft issued a vital out-of-band (emergency) replace on March 2 for Home windows Server 2022 to deal with a certificates renewal challenge with passwordless authentication know-how Home windows Howdy for Enterprise.
Individually, Adobe shipped updates to repair 80 vulnerabilities — a few of them vital in severity — in quite a lot of merchandise, together with Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three excessive severity CVEs.
For a whole breakdown of all of the patches Microsoft launched at present, try the SANS Web Storm Heart’s Patch Tuesday put up. Home windows enterprise admins who want to keep abreast of any information about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is at all times price a go to. Please be at liberty to drop a remark beneath should you expertise any points apply this month’s patches.
