March 10, 2026
4 Min Read

Microsoft addresses 83 CVEs including two vulnerabilities that were publicly disclosed prior to a patch being released.
Microsoft patched 83 CVEs in its March 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with eight rated critical and 75 rated as important. Our counts omitted one CVE (CVE-2026-26030) assigned by GitHub.

This month’s update includes patches for:

Elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities accounted for 55.4% of the vulnerabilities patched this month, followed by remote code execution (RCE)vulnerabilities at 20.5%.
CVE-2026-21262, CVE-2026-26115 and CVE-2026-26116 are EoP vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft SQL Server. Each of these flaws received a CVSSv3 score of 8.8 and were rated as important. While each of these were assessed as “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft’s Exploitability Index, CVE-2026-21262 was publicly disclosed as a zero-day. While no exploitation has been reported by Microsoft, a successful exploit of any one of these three flaws would result in an attacker gaining SQL sysadmin privileges.
CVE-2026-26127 is a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability affecting.NET 9.0 and 10.0 on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It received a CVSSv3 score of 7.5 and was rated as important. According to Microsoft, this vulnerability was publicly disclosed prior to patches being made available. Although it was publicly disclosed, Microsoft assesses that exploitation is unlikely for this DoS vulnerability.
.NET updates this month also include patches to address CVE-2026-26131, an important severity EoP vulnerability for.NET 10 installations on Linux.
CVE-2026-24287, CVE-2026-24289 and CVE-2026-26132 are EoP vulnerabilities in the Windows Kernel. Each was assigned CVSSv3 scores of 7.8 and rated important. A local, authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities in order to gain SYSTEM privileges. While Microsoft reports no evidence of exploitation, it did assess CVE-2026-24289 and CVE-2026-26132 as “Exploitation More Likely.” Including these three CVEs, six EoPs affecting Windows Kernel have been patched so far in 2026.
CVE-2026-26110 and CVE-2026-26113 are RCE vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Office. Both received CVSSv3 scores of 8.4 and were rated as critical. A local, unauthenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to achieve local code execution. Microsoft notes that the preview pane is an attack vector for these flaws and both CVEs were assessed as “Exploitation Less Likely.”
A list of all the plugins released for Microsoft’s March 2026 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.
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