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 this vulnerability?
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.
According to the CVSS metric, a successful exploitation could lead to a scope change (S:C). What does this mean for this vulnerability?
This means that a successful attack is not limited to Visual Studio Code itself, but can also affect the user’s local system, including files and settings. As a result, the impact extends beyond the application to a different security boundary, increasing the overall severity of the vulnerability.
According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?
The user would have be enticed to open a malicious .code-workspace file in vscode. Users should never open anything that they do not know or trust to be safe.
Security updates
1.123.2 — https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/
Vulnerabilities 1
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Critical 9.6
Visual Studio Code Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Missing authorization in Visual Studio Code allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2026-47281 Visual Studio Code Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-47281
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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