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Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday Fixes 112 Flaws, Including 8 Critical and an Exploited Zero-Day

CISA set a Feb. 3 deadline, prompting organizations to prioritize fixes.

Overview

  • Microsoft patched vulnerabilities across Windows and Office, with critical remote code execution risks in LSASS, Word, and Excel plus elevation-of-privilege bugs in the Graphics component and VBS Enclave.
  • CVE-2026-20805 in Desktop Window Manager was confirmed exploited and added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog; the flaw can leak memory addresses and help defeat ASLR in attack chains.
  • Security firms released guidance and detections, with Cisco Talos publishing new Snort rules and advising customers to update signature sets for exploitation attempts tied to this month’s disclosures.
  • Microsoft addressed Secure Boot certificate expiration (CVE-2026-21265), warning that systems relying on 2011 certificates must update to maintain Secure Boot protections.
  • Legacy soft modem drivers implicated in an elevation-of-privilege risk were removed (including agrsm64.sys, agrsm.sys, smserl64.sys, and smserial.sys), which will disable dependent modem hardware on Windows.