Known exploited vulnerability

CVE-2018-8589

Microsoft Win32k Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

What is affected

Vendor Microsoft
Product Win32k

The vulnerability

A privilege escalation vulnerability exists when Windows improperly handles calls to Win32k.sys. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run remote code in the security context of the local system.

Required action

Apply updates per vendor instructions.

US federal civilian agencies were required to act by 13 June 2022 under BOD 22-01. The deadline is a compliance date, not a measure of severity — it says nothing about how dangerous the flaw is to anyone else.

Where this comes from

Every field on this page is taken from the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, last synced 13 Nov 2026, 00:30. Nothing here is our own assessment. For the technical scoring, see the NVD record below.

NVD record ↗ CVE.org record ↗

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