Microsoft released emergency fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities in the malware protection components of Microsoft Defender. The flaws allow local attackers to gain system-level privileges or cause the anti-malware service to stop working correctly.
Both conditions are valuable in a malware attack, first to prevent detection if the system relies only on Microsoft endpoint protection and second to gain full control over the system.
On Wednesday, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), added the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 and CVE-2026-45498, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, signaling that exploitation was detected i...