A currently exploited zero-day elevation of privilege vulnerability that needs to be patched in a Windows driver for WinSock is the highlight of the 398 fixes issued today in Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday releases.
The hole is in Windows’ Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock (CVE-2026-68820), which, according to Todd Schell, principal product manager at Ivanti, has been a recurring target for local privilege-escalation bugs throughout 2026. Past vulnerabilities in this component have let an authorized attacker win a race condition to gain SYSTEM privileges.
“Exploitation has already been detected,” noted Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, “making this the highest ...