MSRC-CVE-2026-88174 — Windows Deployment Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Summary

Impact: Remote Code Execution. Microsoft rating: Critical. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Unlikely. 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.

Security updates
10.0.17763.9376 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126651
10.0.20348.5761 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126655
10.0.26100.33650 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126646
10.0.14393.9612 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126868
6.2.9200.26434 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126835
6.3.9600.23470 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5126836

Vulnerabilities 1

High 8.1

CVE-2026-88174

Windows Deployment Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Concurrent execution using shared resource with improper synchronization ('race condition') in Windows Deployment Services allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2019 (Server Core installation) Windows 10 Version 1809 Windows

Oct 13, 2026

Revision history

2026-10-13 #1
Information published.

References

CVE-2026-88174 Windows Deployment Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-88174
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