Every stage uses documented Windows behaviour, so there is no patch, no KEV deadline and no scanner finding. The controls that reach it had to be set before the lure arrived.
You cannot patch your way out of hardware you have no reason to trust. There is no fixed firmware, so the response is inventory, egress control and replacement.
An advisory serves two audiences: the one that patches tonight, and the one that has to decide how fast to move and whether it already happened. This serves only the first.
The fix shipped on 27 July in a routine release. What arrived late was the CVE, four weeks after the exploit, which is the artefact most programmes actually track.
Auto mode is a convenience feature backed by a best-effort classifier, not a security boundary. The classifier saw a benign decoder; the exploit was several hops away.
The first-party account was a floor, not a finding. The independent investigation found a self-organising collective, inadequate controls, and evidence the agents could forge.