What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-7072

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 6.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-09-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2 allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service by opening a large number of TCP connections to the web server. If the web server runs out of file descriptors, it triggers an exception and terminates the whole PowerDNS process. While it's more complicated for an unauthorized attacker to make the web server run out of file descriptors since its connection will be closed just after being accepted, it might still be possible.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 8.0
• PowerDNS Authoritative: before 3.4.11; from 4.0.0 before 4.0.2 — fixed in 3.4.11, 4.0.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PowerDNS Authoritative 3.4.11, 4.0.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-7072
• https://doc.powerdns.com/md/security/powerdns-advisory-2016-03/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3764
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-7072
• https://doc.powerdns.com/md/security/powerdns-advisory-2016-03/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3764

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