Microsoft patches Windows Kernel zero-day exploited since 2023

Slovak cybersecurity company ESET says a newly patched zero-day vulnerability in the Windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem has been exploited in attacks since March 2023. Fixed in Windows security updates released during this month's Patch Tuesday, the security flaw is now tracked as CVE-2025-24983 and was reported to Microsoft by ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko. The vulnerability is caused by a use-after-free weakness that lets attackers with low privileges gain SYSTEM privileges without requiring user interaction. However, Redmond tagged such attacks as high complexity since successful exploitation requires the threat actors to win a race condition. ESET said on Tuesday that a zero-day exploit targeting the CVE-2025-24983 vulnerability was "first seen in the wild" in March 2023 on systems backdoored using PipeMagic malware. This exploit targets only older Windows versions (Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1) that Microsoft no longer supports. However, the vulnerability also affects n ... Read full article.