CVE-2026-20943 Microsoft Office Click-To-Run Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

What is CVE-2026-20943?

CVE-2026-20943 is a high-severity path traversal vulnerability in Microsoft Office, published on 13 Jan 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Untrusted search path in Microsoft Office allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code locally.

Weakness: CWE-426

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-20943?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Deployment Tool, Microsoft Sharepoint Server.

How do I fix CVE-2026-20943?

No fix has been published for CVE-2026-20943 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2026-20943 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-20943 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office

• CVE-2018-0798 Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2015-1770 Microsoft Office Uninitialized Memory Use Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2006-2492 Microsoft Word Malformed Object Pointer Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2018-0802 Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Exploited High 7.8
• CVE-2017-11882 Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Exploited High 7.8

All Microsoft Office vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-7mcc-vv62-fp9q.