Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Less Likely. Customer action: Required.
Details
What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?
A successful attacker could obtain the permissions associated with the MCP Server’s managed identity. This may allow the attacker to access or perform actions on any resources that the managed identity is authorized to reach. The attacker does not gain broader tenant‑level or administrator permissions; only those tied to the compromised managed identity.
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 take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.
Security updates
1.123.2 — https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/
Vulnerabilities 1
-
High 7.5
Visual Studio Code Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Improper input validation in Visual Studio Code allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network.
Revision history
-
#2
Updated the Security Updates build number and title as the Chat extension is now merged into Visual Studio Code. This is an informational change only.
-
#1
Information published.
References
-
CVE-2026-40376 Visual Studio Code Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-40376
-
Microsoft Exploitability Index
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/exploitability-index?rtc=1
-
Microsoft Support Lifecycle
https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle
-
Common Vulnerability Scoring System
https://www.first.org/cvss