Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Less Likely. Customer action: Required.
Details
According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?
Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to win a race condition.
According to the CVSS metric, successful exploitation could lead to a scope change (S:C). What does this mean for this vulnerability?
In this case, a successful attack could be performed from a low privilege AppContainer. The attacker could elevate their privileges and execute code or access resources at a higher integrity level than that of the AppContainer execution environment.
What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?
An attacker could use this vulnerability to elevate privileges from a Low Integrity Level in a contained ("sandboxed") execution environment to a Medium Integrity Level. Please refer to AppContainer isolation and Mandatory Integrity Control for more information.
Security updates
10.0.17763.8276 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5073723
10.0.20348.4648 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5073457
10.0.19044.6809 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5073724
10.0.26100.32230 — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/a6021fd2-b3b7-45a7-b68e-35c28a2a77da
10.0.26200.7623 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5074109
10.0.22631.6491 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5073455
10.0.25398.2092 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5073450
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 7.8
Windows Management Services Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Use after free in Windows Management Services allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2026-20865 Windows Management Services Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-20865
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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