What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-29549

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.3 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: 2022-08-18 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-354

Description

An issue was discovered in Qualys Cloud Agent 4.8.0-49. It executes programs at various full pathnames without first making ownership and permission checks (e.g., to help ensure that a program was installed by root) and without integrity checks (e.g., a checksum comparison against known legitimate programs). Also, the vendor recommendation is to install this agent software with root privileges. Thus, privilege escalation is possible on systems where any of these pathnames is controlled by a non-root user. An example is /opt/firebird/bin/isql, where the /opt/firebird directory is often owned by the firebird user.

Affected products

• Qualys Cloud Agent For Linux: before 2.5.548.2 — fixed in 2.5.548.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Qualys Cloud Agent For Linux 2.5.548.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/168367/Qualys-Cloud-Agent-Arbitrary-Code-Execution.html
• http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2022/Sep/10
• http://software.firstworks.com/p/getting-started-with-firebird.html
• https://blog.qualys.com/product-tech/2022/08/15/qualys-security-updates-cloud-agent-for-linux
• https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/168367/Qualys-Cloud-Agent-Arbitrary-Code-Execution.html
• http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2022/Sep/10
• http://software.firstworks.com/p/getting-started-with-firebird.html
• https://blog.qualys.com/product-tech/2022/08/15/qualys-security-updates-cloud-agent-for-linux
• https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research

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