What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-0026: Cortex XDR Agent: Unintended Program Execution Leads to Local Privilege Escalation (PE) Vulnerability

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-05-11 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-282

Description

A local privilege escalation (PE) vulnerability exists in Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR agent software on Windows that enables an authenticated local user with file creation privilege in the Windows root directory (such as C:\) to execute a program with elevated privileges. This issue impacts all versions of Cortex XDR agent without content update 330 or a later content update version.

Affected products

• Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR Agent: 6.1, 6.1.4-hotfix, 6.1.5, 6.1.5-hotfix, 6.1.6, 6.1.7 (+14)
• Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR Agent: 7.7.* without CU-330, 7.6.* without CU-330, 7.5 CE 7.5.* without CU-330, 7.4.* without CU-330, 6.1.* without CU-330, 7.5.* without CU-330

References

• https://security.paloaltonetworks.com/CVE-2022-0026
• https://security.paloaltonetworks.com/CVE-2022-0026

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