Loading vulnerability…
CVE-2020-0986 is a Windows local elevation-of-privilege vulnerability affecting the Windows kernel’s handling of objects in memory and observed in exploitation through the GDI Print / Print Spooler path, specifically splwow64.exe. Public reporting and in-the-wild analysis describe the bug as a memory-corruption issue reachable via interprocess communication with splwow64.exe, where exploitation yields arbitrary memory read/write within the target process and enables bypass of protections such as Control Flow Guard and EncodePointer-related defenses. Kaspersky’s Operation PowerFall analysis and later Magnitude EK reporting both tie the vulnerability to splwow64.exe and the GDI Print / Print Spooler API, with exploit code abusing pointer encoding around fpDocumentEvent to redirect execution and elevate privileges. Microsoft’s advisory language characterizes the root cause more generally as the Windows kernel failing to properly handle objects in memory.
Mallory correlates every CVE against your assets, your vendors, and active adversary campaigns. Know which vulnerabilities matter for you, not just which ones are loud.
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.
If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.
Patch, then assume compromise.
No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.
No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
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.
3 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A referenced vulnerability mentioned only in citations without substantive discussion in the content.
A Windows memory corruption vulnerability in splwow64.exe used by Magnitude for local privilege escalation and escape from Internet Explorer's Enhanced Protected Mode sandbox.
Windows elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in the GDI Print/Print Spooler (splwow64.exe) path, described as an arbitrary pointer dereference enabling arbitrary read/write in splwow64.exe and subsequent code execution (bypassing CFG/EncodePointer).
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.