‘BlueHammer’ Exploit Targets Windows, Potentially Impacting 1 Billion+ Devices

**Executive summary:** A security researcher publicly released exploit code for an unpatched Windows local privilege escalation vulnerability dubbed "BlueHammer", which allows an attacker with low-privilege access to escalate to SYSTEM and potentially harvest the SAM database; Microsoft has not issued a patch and independent analysis confirmed the exploit works, raising the risk of full machine compromise for affected systems.