MSRC-CVE-2026-96231 — .NET Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

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 this vulnerability?
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain ROOT privileges.

Security updates
18.10.4 — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2026/release-notes
17.14.42 — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes
8.0.32 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5130034
10.0.13 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5130036
9.0.21 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5130035
11.0.0-rc.2 — https://github.com/dotnet/announcements/issues/479

Vulnerabilities 1

High 7.8

CVE-2026-96231

.NET Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in .NET allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.

Microsoft Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 version 17.14 .NET 9.0 runtime .NET 10.0 runtime Ubuntu Alpine Wolfi NuGet

Oct 13, 2026

Revision history

2026-10-15 #2
Updated the Security Updates table to add KB article links for .NET 11.0 and download and KB article links for Microsoft Visual Studio. This is an informational change only; the fixed builds are unchanged.
2026-10-13 #1
Information published.

References

CVE-2026-96231 .NET Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-96231
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