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 SYSTEM privileges.
According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does this mean for this vulnerability?
An attacker would need specific conditions to be in place (i.e. particular protocol settings, or configurations, etc.) before an attack could succeed, which reduces the likelihood of widespread or opportunistic exploitation.
Security updates
10.0.14393.9688 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131291
10.0.17763.9487 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131085
10.0.19044.7846 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131096
10.0.20348.5870 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131090
10.0.22631.7711 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131087
10.0.26100.9974 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132061
10.0.26100.9911 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132043
10.0.26100.33822 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131080
10.0.26100.33730 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5131077
10.0.28000.3501 — https://support.microsoft.com/help/5132059
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 7.0
Winsock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Use after free in Winsock allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2026-96994 Winsock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-96994
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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