Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing “zero-day” flaws this month (compared to February’s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday.
Image: Shutterstock, @nwz.
Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.
“This isn’t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett said. “The CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.”
The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in applications running on .NET. Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot.
It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated “exploitation more likely” — across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include:
–CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24289: High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8).
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2026-21536, a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says it’s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent.
XBOW has consistently ranked at or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.
“Although Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,” McCarthy said. “This development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.”
Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.
Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities — some of them critical in severity — in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.
For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this month’s patches.
Contrary to this article, updates this month contain fixes for at least two publicly acknowledged zero days.
Really? Which two? IDK how you define zero-day, but for me it’s an unpatched and actively exploited vulnerability. As mentioned in the story, there were two flaws fixed this month that were previously disclosed publicly. I believe in both cases there was not even sample exploit code involved.
I’m just going off every other news outlet reporting. Bleeping computer, for example, stated “This month’s Patch Tuesday fixes two publicly disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities, with none of them known to be exploited in attacks. Microsoft classifies a zero-day flaw as publicly disclosed or actively exploited while no official fix is available.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Okay. Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder why Microsoft would call it zero-day when they’re not aware of exploitation; doesn’t seem to suit their interests to do so. I’ve always believed that calling bugs 0day just because someone detailed a vulnerability (without providing examples of how to exploit them) publicly is unnecessarily alarmist. Real zero-days are a call for greater urgency, IMHO.
I think Microsoft likes to call them zero day when they feel the exploit is available even though nobody is currently using it. But then again maybe Microsoft knows something nobody else does? Is it one of those deals where it depends on who is releasing these security descriptors for the updates? One person calls them zero day the other something less dire? I saw the Bleeping Computer release too. They said the 2 zero-day ones were publicly disclosed. Not actively exploited. I guess sort of splitting hairs there.
I don’t know if they know what they’re talking about, but Lifehacker reported there are two:
https://lifehacker.com/tech/microsoft-patch-tuesday-march-2026#:~:text=Two%20publicly%20disclosed%20zero%2Ddays%20for%20this%20Patch%20Tuesday
I had the same discussion with my coworker, who used CoPilot to summarize and the previously disclosed findings were included in the response because the patch is included in this month’s bundle. Strictly speaking anything previously published is no longer a “zero day” as far as I know, but it’s genesis stays with it.
I mean, any bug, prior to being disclosed, is at some point a ‘zero-day’ bug. AFAIK, it ceases being an 0-day the minute it is disclosed, yah?
Have they heard about two-factor authentication? They were obviously phished. Maybe put TFA in place now.