A vulnerability in the Group Policy implementation of multiple Microsoft Windows versions improperly handles the distribution of passwords through Group Policy Preferences. Password material stored in Group Policy Preferences can be retrieved by an authenticated remote user who has access to the SYSVOL share, allowing disclosure of sensitive credential information. Because those recovered credentials may belong to privileged local or domain accounts, the issue can be leveraged for elevation of privilege. The vulnerability was publicly referred to as the Group Policy Preferences Password Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability and was reported as exploited in the wild in 2014.
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What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
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Patch, then assume compromise.
No valid public exploits. Mallory filtered out 1 candidate as fakes, detection scripts, or README-only repos.
All candidate exploits were filtered out by Mallory's validation.
Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
6 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A Microsoft vulnerability that CISA KEV’s knownRansomwareCampaignUse field silently flipped to Known during 2025 (evidence of ransomware campaign use).
A vulnerability in Group Policy Preferences that allows remote authenticated users to obtain plaintext passwords from SYSVOL, leading to privilege escalation.
A Windows privilege escalation vulnerability listed among the stolen FireEye exploit payloads.
A vulnerability included in FireEye's list of 16 CVEs for which protections can help limit the effectiveness of stolen red-team tools.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.