CVE-2018-10170

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-04-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-732

Description

NordVPN 6.12.7.0 for Windows suffers from a SYSTEM privilege escalation vulnerability through the "nordvpn-service" service. This service establishes an NetNamedPipe endpoint that allows arbitrary installed applications to connect and call publicly exposed methods. The "Connect" method accepts a class instance argument that provides attacker control of the OpenVPN command line. An attacker can specify a dynamic library plugin that should run for every new VPN connection attempt. This plugin will execute code in the context of the SYSTEM user.

Affected products

NordVPN: 6.12.7.0

References

https://github.com/VerSprite/research/blob/master/advisories/VS-2018-018.md
https://github.com/VerSprite/research/blob/master/advisories/VS-2018-018.md

Get alerted when CVE-2018-10170 or the next vulnerability affects your stack