The Science of Exploitability: Decoding BlueHammer

Executive Summary BlueHammer (CVE-2026-33825) is an eight-stage local privilege-escalation chain targeting the Windows Defender Antimalware Platform before 4.18.26030.3011. It does not grant initial access; an attacker needs standard-user code execution first. Still, in the lab, it reached NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, recovered domain-admin credentials from LSASS, and moved laterally via pass-the-hash. …