Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

Successful exploitation allows a locally authenticated or otherwise locally present attacker with low privileges to elevate privileges on the affected Windows system. This can result in high impact to confidentiality, integrity, and availability, including full compromise of the host, execution of actions as a highly privileged account, disabling security controls, credential theft, persistence, and use of the system as a pivot for further intrusion. The provided content also states the vulnerability was exploited in attacks before patches were released.

If immediate patching is not possible, reduce exposure by limiting local access to systems, minimizing the number of low-privileged interactive users, enforcing least privilege, restricting execution of untrusted code, monitoring for anomalous privilege escalation activity, and hardening endpoints with current Microsoft Defender and EDR protections. These are compensating controls only; the authoritative mitigation is installation of Microsoft's security fix.

Apply Microsoft's official security update for CVE-2021-31979 via the Microsoft Security Update Guide and ensure affected Windows systems are fully patched with the July 2021 security updates or later cumulative updates that include the fix. Prioritize remediation because the vulnerability was reported as exploited in the wild before patch availability.