privilege escalation

4 articles · newest first

A laptop running Windows in a dim office setting, at night

North Korean hackers had a Windows bug for weeks before Microsoft even knew about it

Check Point caught the exploit chain in the wild before Microsoft's own August Patch Tuesday shipped the fix — and this one installs a kernel-mode rootkit.

Priya Nair · Aug 26 · 6 min

Windows Security app showing Microsoft Defender antivirus status on a laptop screen

Software

Microsoft's own antivirus has a hole in it right now — and even Microsoft can't patch it yet

CVE-2026-69414 lets a local attacker walk straight to SYSTEM through Windows Defender itself, there's still no fix nine days after the CVE was assigned, and CISA just started a clock on it.

Priya Nair · Aug 23 · 6 min

A Windows laptop displaying a security alert, representative of the Defender CVE-2026-50656 ShieldBreak vulnerability

Software

microsoft threatened to sue a researcher for going public. he just broke their patch — again

Microsoft fixed the RoguePlanet Defender flaw in July. On August 12, the same researcher it threatened with legal action published a working bypass — and there's still no patch.

Priya Nair · Aug 14 · 6 min

Rows of Linux servers in a data center rack

Software

This Linux bug has quietly handed out root access since 2017 — and it leaves zero trace

Qualys just named a nine-year-old race condition in XFS that turns any local login into root, and the disk never shows it happened.

Priya Nair · Aug 5 · 6 min