A just-patched vulnerability in the Windows operating system that was previously unknown up until last week is being actively exploited in the wild; it opens the door for full system takeover.
Discovered by Vasily Berdnikov and Boris Larin of Kaspersky Lab on St. Patrick’s Day this year, the flaw (CVE-2019-0859) is a use-after-free issue in the Windows kernel that allows local privilege escalation (LPE). It’s being used in advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns, the researchers said, targeting 64-bit versions of Windows (from Windows 7 to older builds of Windows 10).
