What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-35603: Claude Code: Insecure System-Wide Configuration Loading Enables Local Privilege Escalation on Windows
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.3 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-04-17 · updated 2026-10-26
- Weakness: CWE-426
Description
Claude Code is an agentic coding tool. In versions prior to 2.1.75 on Windows, Claude Code loaded the system-wide default configuration from C:\ProgramData\ClaudeCode\managed-settings.json without validating directory ownership or access permissions. Because the ProgramData directory is writable by non-administrative users by default and the ClaudeCode subdirectory was not pre-created or access-restricted, a low-privileged local user could create this directory and place a malicious configuration file that would be automatically loaded for any user launching Claude Code on the same machine. Exploiting this would have required a shared multi-user Windows system and a victim user to launch Claude Code after the malicious configuration was placed. This issue has been fixed on version 2.1.75.
Affected products
- anthropics claude-code: before 2.1.75 — fixed in 2.1.75
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: anthropics claude-code 2.1.75. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
Get alerted when CVE-2026-35603 or the next vulnerability affects your stack