A DLL Hijacking caused by drive remapping combined with a poisoning of the activation cache in Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2022 allows a malicious authenticated attacker to elevate from a medium integrity process to a high integrity process without the intervention of a UAC prompt.
The product searches for critical resources using an externally-supplied search path that can point to resources that are not under the product’s direct control.
This might allow attackers to execute their own programs, access unauthorized data files, or modify configuration in unexpected ways. If the product uses a search path to locate critical resources such as programs, then an attacker could modify that search path to point to a malicious program, which the targeted product would then execute. The problem extends to any type of critical resource that the product trusts. Some of the most common variants of untrusted search path are: