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CVE-2021-1648 is an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows splwow64 service, the WOW64 print driver host used for x86 printing components on x64 Windows systems. The issue was patched in January 2021 and has been described as related to, and in some reporting conflated with, CVE-2020-17008. Available technical analysis indicates it was a bypass of Microsoft’s earlier fix for CVE-2020-0986 and encompassed one privilege-escalation case and two information-disclosure cases. After the CVE-2020-0986 patch, Microsoft added printer-handle validation logic and helper routines intended to validate offsets and pointers. The reported bypass allowed an attacker to use one command path to place an attacker-controlled printer handle into global service state and then reach a second command path that performed a memcpy operation while validating only the destination buffer range, not the source pointer. Additional analysis also identified insufficient pointer-range validation in helper routines that accepted offsets based on a broad numeric upper-bound check rather than verifying that the resulting pointers remained within the intended shared memory region. In practice, this allowed attacker-controlled values to be treated as trusted pointers inside the more privileged splwow64 process, enabling local privilege escalation and memory disclosure.
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What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
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No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
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Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
2 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A follow-on patch CVE referenced as part of the more complete remediation path for CVE-2020-0986.
A vulnerability in the Windows splwow64 service discussed as including an elevation-of-privilege issue and two information disclosure cases, including an arbitrary address read and bypasses of prior patch checks.
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.