The flaws could lead to arbitrary code execution, authorization bypasses, and privilege escalation.
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The flaws affect products such as Commerce, Photoshop, ColdFusion, Substance 3D, Dimension, FrameMaker and Bridge.
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A joint international law enforcement and industry operation against scammers netted 28 arrests, rescued 117 trafficking victims and led to the takedown of more than 3.7 million accounts, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.
The crackdown, billed as “Joint Disruption Week,” focused on West Africa and also identified more than $11 million in freezable funds and led to the seizure of hundreds of electronic devices. The range of scams involved included law enforcement impersonation scams, digital arrest extortion schemes, pig butchering and other online fraud operations targeting victims around the world.
Participants heralded it as the largest joint scam operation to date, and the first focused on West Africa.
“For so long, the problem of international scams seemed impossible to tackle,” Kelly Milliron, acting chief of staff and counselor to the Assistant Attorney General leading the Criminal Division, told reporters. “But now, because of collaborations like Joint Disruption Week, we have a plan, a consolidated approach, bringing together people that can bring solutions and, most of all, safety for our citizens.”
It’s the latest effort in the Trump administration’s ongoing bid to make countering scam operations a theme of his term, and to make disrupting cyber adversaries and criminals a central focus of its cyber strategy.
Participating agencies in the London-hosted operation beyond the Justice Department were the Scam Center Strike Force under the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, Homeland Security Investigations, the Homeland Security Task Force, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, the Nigerian Joint Case Team on Cybercrimes, the Nigeria Police Force’s National Cybercrime Center and the Ghanaian Cyber Security Authority, INTERPOL and agencies from Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand also were involved.
Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Cyjax, Elliptic, Chainalysis, Flashpoint, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Silent Push, Starlink and TRM Labs were companies that participated in the operation. Meta said it removed more than 3.7 million accounts, groups and pages from Facebook and Instagram based in West Africa, a majority of which targeted people in the United States and United Kingdom.
Some on Capitol Hill have raised concerns about whether U.S. operations to counter scams are coordinated enough.
The operation actually began in September, with a series of raids in Ghana before last week’s designated action. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said Disruption Week occurred not long after a new partnership with the United Kingdom.
“The aim is to bring cases in parallel and also to combat fraud together through joint targeting,” she said. “This was the perfect time to continue that partnership.”
It’s not clear how many of the potentially freezable funds will actually be frozen as a result of the operation.
“Identifying the assets is the easy part, and tracing them, going after and developing probable cause within our investigations so that we can legally seize them does require a little bit of work,” said Matthew Floyd, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “So at this point, that’s why it’s much easier in these efforts to identify assets initially, and then they’ll fold into our investigations as we move forward.”
Disruption Week was the culmination of agencies meeting to combine forces, something that will happen on a regular basis, Floyd said, but at an interval to be determined going forward. The operation led to the sharing of more than 30 leads on scam centers, participants said.
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Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing “zero-day” flaws this month (compared to February’s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday.
Image: Shutterstock, @nwz.
Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.
“This isn’t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett said. “The CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.”
The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in applications running on .NET. Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot.
It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated “exploitation more likely” — across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include:
–CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24289: High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8).
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2026-21536, a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says it’s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent.
XBOW has consistently ranked at or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.
“Although Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,” McCarthy said. “This development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.”
Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.
Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities — some of them critical in severity — in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.
For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this month’s patches.
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