December 9, 2025
5 Min Read

Microsoft addresses 56 CVEs, including two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and one zero-day that was exploited in the wild to close out the final Patch Tuesday of 2025
Microsoft patched 56 CVEs in its December 2025 Patch Tuesday release, with three rated critical, and 53 rated as important.

This month’s update includes patches for:

Elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities accounted for 50% of the vulnerabilities patched this month, followed by remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities at 33.9%.
CVE-2025-62221 is an EoP vulnerability in the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver. It was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 7.8 and rated as important. A local, authenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability to elevate to SYSTEM privileges. According to Microsoft, this vulnerability was exploited in the wild as a zero-day.
Microsoft also patched two additional EoP vulnerabilities in the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver, CVE-2025-62454 and CVE-2025-62457. Both were assigned the same CVSSv3 score of 7.8 and rated important. However, CVE-2025-62454 was assessed as “Exploitation More Likely” according to Microsoft’s Exploitability Index while CVE-2025-62457 was assessed as “Exploitation Unlikely.”
CVE-2025-64671 is a RCE vulnerability in the GitHub Copilot Plugin for JetBrains Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). It was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 8.4, rated important and assessed as “Exploitation Less Likely” The issue stems from a command injection vulnerability in GitHub Copilot. An attacker could leverage a “malicious Cross Prompt Inject” either through an MCP Server or untrusted files. Successful exploitation would grant an attacker the ability to append unapproved commands onto existing allowed commands due to the ‘auto-approve’ setting in the terminal.
This vulnerability has been dubbed IDEsaster by security researcher, Ari Marzuk who is credited for reporting this vulnerability to Microsoft.
CVE-2025-54100 is a RCE vulnerability in Windows PowerShell. This vulnerability was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 7.8 and is rated as important. According to the advisory, this RCE was publicly disclosed prior to a patch being made available. The advisory notes that after installing the update, a warning prompt will be displayed anytime the Invoke-WebRequest command is used.
This vulnerability was attributed to several researchers including Justin Necke, DeadOverflow, Pēteris Hermanis Osipovs, Anonymous, Melih Kaan Yıldız and Osman Eren. The researcher known as DeadOverflow has a YouTube video demonstrating how this flaw can be abused and links to a HackerOne report opened with the curl project by another researcher. According to the HackerOne report, the issue was not related to curl, but rather appeared to be related to the PowerShell curl alias that utilizes Invoke-WebRequest.
CVE-2025-62458 is an EoP vulnerability affecting Microsoft’s Win32k, a core kernel-side driver used in Windows. This vulnerability received a CVSSv3 score of 7.8, was rated as important and assessed as “Exploitation More Likely.” Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM level privileges on an affected host.
Including CVE-2025-62458, this is the ninth EoP vulnerability affecting Win32k addressed by Microsoft in 2025, with 14 EoP flaws addressed in the driver throughout 2024.
CVE-2025-62554 and CVE-2025-62557 are RCE vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Office. Both received CVSSv3 scores of 8.4 and were rated as critical. An attacker could exploit these flaws through social engineering by sending the malicious Microsoft Office document file to an intended target. Successful exploitation would grant code execution privileges to the attacker.
Despite being flagged as “Less Likely” to be exploited, Microsoft notes that the Preview Pane is an attack vector for both vulnerabilities, which means exploitation does not require the target to open the file. According to the advisories from Microsoft, security updates for Microsoft Office LTSC for Mac are not yet available and will be released as soon as they are ready.
A list of all the plugins released for Microsoft’s December 2025 Patch Tuesday update can be found here. As always, we recommend patching systems as soon as possible and regularly scanning your environment to identify those systems yet to be patched.
For more specific guidance on best practices for vulnerability assessments, please refer to our blog post on How to Perform Efficient Vulnerability Assessments with Tenable.
Join Tenable's Research Special Operations (RSO) Team on Tenable Connect and engage with us in the Threat Roundtable group for further discussions on the latest cyber threats.
Learn more about Tenable One, the Exposure Management Platform for the modern attack surface.
The Research Special Operations (RSO) team serves as Tenable’s Forward Logistics Element in the threat landscape, providing customers with the analyses and contextualized exposure intelligence required to manage risks to critical business assets. With over 150 years of collective expertise, this hand-picked group of world-class security researchers is united with one mission: to cut through the noise and deliver critical intelligence about the most dangerous cyber threats emerging right now. Uniting the missions of the Tenable Security Response, Zero-Day Research, and Decision Science Operations teams, RSO disseminates timely, accurate, and actionable information about the latest threats and exposures.
Enter your email and never miss timely alerts and security guidance from the experts at Tenable.