Novel Exploit Chain Enables Windows UAC Bypass

Researchers from Fortra published a proof-of-concept for CVE-2024-6769 demonstrating a UAC bypass/privilege escalation in Windows that allows an authenticated user in the Administrators group to escalate to full SYSTEM by remapping the root drive, placing a malicious DLL to be loaded by ctfmon.exe, and poisoning the activation context cache; Microsoft disputes that this constitutes a vulnerability, arguing it falls under intended non-robust security boundaries, while Fortra warns of the serious potential impact for administrator accounts.