A flaw in the Windows 11 Get Help troubleshooting platform could let an ordinary user take full control of a PC, and Microsoft fixed it quietly without issuing CVE identifiers, iTnews reported on 2 November 2026.

According to iTnews, Get Help runs troubleshooting packages, bundles of PowerShell scripts hosted by Microsoft, through the Diagnostic Execution Service (DiagSvc), which runs with SYSTEM privileges; on Windows 11, Ben Wilson of Melbourne's Tanto Security found that any standard user could launch the service directly with no administrator approval prompt. iTnews reports that the vulnerable troubleshooter fetches Microsoft's Media Creation Tool into a temporary folder that ordinary users can write to and runs it as SYSTEM, and that Wilson exploited two race conditions to take control of the folder and swap in his own program.

Wilson reported the bug to the Microsoft Security Response Centre on 13 May; Microsoft confirmed the behaviour on 29 June and the fix arrived around 1 September, according to iTnews. "Microsoft's fix for the Media Creation Tool bug was to change one line in the PowerShell script," Wilson told iTnews, adding that he has not yet fully tested whether the patch can be bypassed.

According to iTnews, Microsoft paid Wilson US$8,000 for this bug and the same again for a second flaw in the Outlook diagnostic package, while a third flaw in the Calendar diagnostic package is still in disclosure.

"I have not received any CVEs from Microsoft and I am not sure I ever will," Wilson told iTnews; to the best of his knowledge, iTnews reports, the Media Creation Tool flaw has not been exploited in the wild. (source: iTnews)