The disgruntled researcher continued their vendetta against Microsoft by publishing yet another zero-day exploit for Windows Defender.
September 10, 2026
On the heels of a record-breaking Patch Tuesday, the disgruntled security researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse dropped yet another Windows zero-day exploit, which enables privilege escalation and bypasses the fix for a previous Windows exploit released last month.
The latest from the researcher — who also goes by Chaotic Eclipse, MSNightmare, and their X handle, Infinite Nightmare — is the "ShieldCrash" exploit, which they claim is a patch bypass for CVE-2026-69414, or "ShieldBreak." ShieldBreak is a privilege escalation flaw in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine of Windows Defender.
Nightmare-Eclipse released the ShieldBreak exploit on August's Patch Tuesday, one in a series of exploits for Windows flaws released monthly by the researcher since April. Microsoft has since patched the flaw, but the researcher claims it was not done properly.
