“This CVE is a masterclass in path abuse, trusted location redirection, and privilege escalation using native components — everything a red team loves and a blue team fears,” Cyberdom said to Cyber Security News. Security analysts have developed detection rules to identify potential exploitation attempts, focusing on suspicious junction creations targeting the Windows Update Stack paths and monitoring for unusual file operations involving the Microsoft\UpdateStack directory. Unlike complex exploits requiring sophisticated techniques, CVE-2025-21204 represents what security experts call a “quiet privilege escalation vulnerability” that blends into normal OS behavior by abusing trust rather than exploiting memory corruption. A security flaw has been identified in the Windows Update Stack, exposing millions of Windows systems to the risk of unauthorized code execution and privilege escalation. Tracked as CVE-2025-21204, this vulnerability allows local attackers to gain SYSTEM-level access by manipulating trusted update processes, bypassing standard security controls. This exploitation technique requires no code injection or memory manipulation, making it particularly difficult to detect using traditional security tools. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis. Security experts warn that such “low-level” CVEs often have outsized impacts despite their seemingly simpler exploitation methods. It serves as part of Microsoft’s security improvement to pre-create certain directories and harden the update process against symbolic link attacks.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:35:13 +0000