Skip to content

Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Windows Print Spooler – CVE-2022-22718

  • Resources
  • News
  • Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Windows Print Spooler – CVE-2022-22718

We would like to bring to your attention a recently released patch to address a vulnerability identified within the Windows print spooler service.

This issue is being called ‘SpoolFool’ and is related to the previously known group of vulnerabilities that went under the name ‘Print Nightmare’ which were publicly disclosed towards the end of 2021. Whilst several minor patches and mitigations have been previously released, some of these have been successfully circumvented, potentially leaving the system vulnerable to variations of the original exploit.

This issue is being tracked under the following CVE:

The following CVE’s relate to the earlier print spooler issues that this vulnerability is built on top of:

Exploitability

A proof of concept exploit exists for this issue, but due to the requirements of needing a local access to trigger the vulnerability we are yet to see this being exploited in the wild.

Remediation

As of 8th February 2022, a new patch is available which causes the Spool Directory to no longer be created when the Spooler is initialised, causing the Print Spooler to fall back to its default spool directory. Ensure the following patch has been applied:

References

Silhouette of person in dark environment representing insider threat in agentic IDE security with code and terminal windows in background

When Your IDE Becomes An Insider: Testing Agentic Dev Tools Against Indirect Prompt Injection

Agentic development tools don’t need to bypass your firewall. They’re already inside. And if an attacker can control what they read, they can control what they…
Modern office building at night showing AI agent security risks with autonomous systems running in corporate networks

What Moltbook reveals about AI agent security

The Moltbook launch exposed a critical gap: organizations deploying AI agents faster than they can secure them. Research shows 22% of enterprises currently host unauthorised AI…
Dark underground stairway representing hidden SaaS security vulnerabilities and cloud dependencies

Cloud security vulnerabilities: the unpatchable risks hiding in your SaaS stack 

The cloud gives businesses scalability, agility, and built-in resilience. But it’s created a dangerous illusion: that moving workloads to SaaS platforms and managed services automatically makes…