Microsoft’s first Patch Tuesday of 2026 landed with a familiar headline: more than 110 vulnerabilities fixed across Windows and related products, including dozens of ways for an attacker to turn a low-privilege foothold into something much more serious.
Security researchers count around 58 elevation-of-privilege (EoP) bugs in this month’s release, alongside information disclosure, remote code execution and spoofing issues. On top of that, there’s an actively exploited zero-day in Desktop Window Manager (CVE-2026-20805) and important flaws in Windows Installer and the Windows Graphics component that can be used to gain SYSTEM-level access.
Patch guidance this month is predictable: update quickly, especially on exposed or high-value systems. But if you care about least privilege on Windows, there’s a deeper lesson hiding in the numbers:
Most serious endpoint attacks are still a two-step pattern:
- Get a foothold as a normal user (phishing, browser exploit, stolen credentials, etc.).
- Use a local privilege escalation bug to become admin or SYSTEM and take control of the box.
That second step is exactly what those 58 EoP bugs are about.
Privilege escalation and local admin: two sides of the same problem
Patch Tuesday is a monthly reminder that Windows is constantly fixing new ways to jump from “low privilege” to “high privilege”. But in many environments, users already start on step two:
- Their day-to-day account is in the local Administrators group.
- UAC prompts are just something to click through.
- Legacy apps still run “as admin” because they were never fixed properly.
In that world, an attacker doesn’t even need a fresh EoP bug. A single successful phishing email can drop malware straight into an admin session and get to work:
- Disabling security tools
- Installing persistence
- Dumping credentials and moving laterally
We go deeper into that in The Double-Edged Sword of Local Admin Rights in Windows Environments and Five Myths About Removing Local Admin Rights on Windows (And What Really Happens). The short version: if users are already local admins, you’ve effectively gifted attackers the second half of the attack chain.
Three themes from January’s vulnerabilities
You don’t need to memorise CVE IDs to get value from Patch Tuesday. Instead, look at the patterns:
1. Local bugs that become serious when someone already has a foothold
The actively exploited Desktop Window Manager flaw is “only” an information disclosure bug on paper. But information disclosure flaws are often used to:
- Bypass exploit mitigations
- Stabilise other exploits
- Leak details that help chain multiple bugs together
Combine that with the right EoP, and a normal user session becomes a launchpad for full compromise.
2. Elevation via installers and system components
This month’s patch set also includes a Windows Installer elevation-of-privilege issue and an EoP in the Windows Graphics component that can be used to gain SYSTEM privileges in the right conditions.
That matters because installers, updaters and “helper” utilities are often:
- Trusted by admins
- Used rarely (so they’re not always monitored closely)
- Run with very high privileges when they do appear
If a standard user or malware can influence how those components run, they can often turn that into a full local takeover.
3. Old components still causing new problems
Some of the January fixes touch older drivers and components that have been around for years. That’s another recurring theme:
- Legacy bits of Windows and third-party drivers stick around long after anyone remembers why they’re there.
- Attackers love them, because they often weren’t designed with modern threat models in mind.
All of which gives you more reasons to reduce the blast radius when something inevitably goes wrong.
What this means for your 2026 endpoint plan
So how do you turn January’s Patch Tuesday into something actionable for your own Windows estate?
1. Patch quickly, but assume bugs will keep coming
Yes, you should roll out this month’s updates as part of your normal patch cycle. But you should also assume that:
- There will always be another privilege escalation bug.
- Attackers will continue to chain “normal user” + EoP + lateral movement.
Your job is to make each step in that chain harder.
2. Get serious about removing local admin rights
If this year is the one where you finally take local admin away from most users, Patch Tuesday gives you fresh material for the business case:
- Every EoP bug is less useful to an attacker if most accounts are standard users.
- Every phishing email has a smaller blast radius if it lands in a non-admin session.
Our New Year post Make This the Year You Remove Local Admin Rights on Windows (For Real) lays out a pragmatic 90-day plan to start.
3. Tighten how you handle elevation
“User is standard” is only half the story. The other half is: how do things get elevated when they need to?
If your current model is:
- “Type in a local admin password when UAC pops up”, or
- “Run everything as admin because some things need it”
…then you’re still depending on the same fragile pathways that attackers like to abuse.
A better pattern is:
- Keep users as standard users for day-to-day work.
- Use tools like Intune Endpoint Privilege Management or similar to manage elevation for common tasks.
- Add a per-app elevation layer for stubborn legacy software that really does need admin rights to run.
We talk about this in more detail in Best Practices for Implementing Least Privilege on Windows.
4. Give legacy apps a safer home
Every Windows environment has them: legacy applications that only behave if they run with admin rights. They’re also exactly the kind of processes attackers love to hijack.
Instead of giving up and leaving users in the local Administrators group, treat those apps as exceptions to contain, not reasons to abandon least privilege. That’s where a focused tool helps.
Where Elevator fits in
At UNYK, we built Elevator for Windows to solve exactly this “last mile” problem:
- Users stay as standard users for normal work.
- You define a short, explicit list of applications that should run with admin rights.
- Elevator runs just those applications elevated – not the entire user session.
- Every elevation is logged, so you can see what’s running with extra privilege and tune policies over time.
Patch Tuesday will keep delivering new privilege escalation bugs. You can’t stop that, but you can make sure your environment is less attractive when they appear:
- Fewer users with standing local admin rights.
- Fewer ad hoc elevation paths and mystery installers.
- Clear, auditable rules for which apps are allowed to run as admin.
If you’re tightening up local admin and elevation in 2026, we’d love you to try Elevator on a few of your legacy apps and see how it fits into your least privilege plan.
