What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-12612

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-12-12 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

An issue was discovered in BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Windows through 5.6. When specifying a program to elevate, it can typically be found within the Program Files (x86) folder and therefore uses the %ProgramFiles(x86)% environment variable. However, when this same policy gets pushed to a 32bit machine, this environment variable does not exist. Therefore, since the standard user can create a user level environment variable, they can repoint this variable to any folder the user has full control of. Then, the folder structure can be created in such a way that a rule matches and arbitrary code runs elevated.

Affected products

• BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Windows: before 5.6; 5.6 — fixed in 5.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Windows 5.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://www.beyondtrust.com/support/changelog/privilege-management-for-windows-5-6-sr1
• https://www.beyondtrust.com/trust-center/security-advisories/bt22-09
• https://www.beyondtrust.com/support/changelog/privilege-management-for-windows-5-6-sr1
• https://www.beyondtrust.com/trust-center/security-advisories/bt22-09

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