What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-27985

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-11-23 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-306

Description

Security Onion v2 prior to 2.3.10 has an incorrect sudo configuration, which allows the administrative user to obtain root access without using the sudo password by editing and executing /home/<user>/SecurityOnion/setup/so-setup.

Affected products

• Securityonionsolutions Security Onion: from 2.0.0 before 2.3.10 — fixed in 2.3.10

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Securityonionsolutions Security Onion 2.3.10. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/commit/b14670030349a2747a00ace665568ab5f51ac47b
• https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/releases
• https://s1gh.sh/cve-2020-27985-security-onion-local-privilege-escalation/
• https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/commit/b14670030349a2747a00ace665568ab5f51ac47b
• https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/releases
• https://s1gh.sh/cve-2020-27985-security-onion-local-privilege-escalation/

Get alerted when CVE-2020-27985 or the next vulnerability affects your stack