CVSS base score: 7.8 (High) CISA · v3.1
Score assigned by CISA's Vulnrichment program; the vendor's CVE record did not include one.
Microsoft Malware Protection Engine Improper Restriction of Operations Vulnerability
Vendor: Microsoft Product: Malware Protection Engine
The Microsoft Malware Protection Engine running on Microsoft Forefront and Microsoft Defender on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 and R2 SP1, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 Gold and R2, Windows RT 8.1, Windows 10 Gold, 1511, 1607, and 1703, and Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and 2016, does not properly scan a specially crafted file leading to memory corruption. aka "Microsoft Malware Protection Engine Remote Code Execution Vulnerability".
Each milestone comes from a different source, so gaps between them are gaps in what those sources publish, not evidence that nothing happened. EPSS history for this CVE holds 262 points from 2021-12-11, tracked daily from 2026-09-09; earlier points are weekly, which dates a spike to within a week. Peak probability 96.4% on 2023-03-11.
Check whether a specific version is affected →
What each source publishes about which product versions carry this vulnerability, kept as written rather than merged. Absence here means no source has published applicability data, not that nothing is affected.
No mentions found in monitored research blogs or news feeds.
Coverage across public collections only: Nuclei and OpenVAS NVT (scan);
Snort and Suricata ET Open (network); Sigma and YARA (host/SIEM);
Metasploit, Exploit-DB and public GitHub repositories (exploit). Absence
here means nothing public was found, not that detection is impossible.
GitHub PoC repositories are collected automatically by
PoC-in-GitHub (CC0) and are not vetted:
some are fakes and some are malware. Treat them as evidence that code was
published, not as code to run.
OpenVAS coverage derives from the Greenbone Community Feed, made available
under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0;
its individual Vulnerability Tests are licensed
GNU GPL v2.
Microsoft Malware Protection Engine Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
The vendor's own judgement about their own code, shown alongside CISA's rather than merged into it. The exploitability index is a forward-looking prediction, distinct from a CVSS severity or CISA's SSVC decision, and vendors often report observed exploitation before a CVE reaches the KEV catalog. Vendor advisory →
Defensive techniques inferred by MITRE D3FEND from the underlying weakness (CWE-787) — general hardening and detection guidance for this weakness class, not a vendor patch for this specific CVE.
| Source | Date | Record |
|---|---|---|
| CISA KEV | 2022-03-03 | source record → |
| CISA Vulnrichment | 2025-02-10 | source record → |
No exploit-tool sightings recorded for this CVE.
Evidence tiers are explained on the About page — a merged Metasploit module is far stronger evidence than a distro package mention.