Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Unlikely. Customer action: Required.
Details
What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?
An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could elevate their privileges to perform commands as Root in the target environment.
How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?
A user can download an installer and before the user runs the installer, the attacker could replace it with a malicious installer. When the victim runs the malicious installer the attacker could elevate their privileges.
Security updates
4.80 — https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Check-for-Office-for-Mac-updates-automatically-bfd1e497-c24d-4754-92ab-910a4074d7c1
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 7.8
Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2025-55317 Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-55317
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Microsoft Exploitability Index
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/exploitability-index?rtc=1
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Microsoft Support Lifecycle
https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle
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Common Vulnerability Scoring System
https://www.first.org/cvss