What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-48991

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 6.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2024-11-19 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-362

Description

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by winning a race condition and tricking needrestart into running their own, fake Python interpreter (instead of the system's real Python interpreter). The initial security fix (6ce6136) introduced a regression which was subsequently resolved (42af5d3).

Affected products

• needrestart: before 3.8 — fixed in 3.8

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: needrestart 3.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/liske/needrestart/commit/42af5d328901287a4f79d1f5861ac827a53fd56d
• https://github.com/liske/needrestart/commit/6ce6136cccc307c6b8a0f8cae12f9a22ac2aad59
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-48991
• https://www.qualys.com/2024/11/19/needrestart/needrestart.txt
• http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2024/Nov/17
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/11/30/4
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/11/msg00014.html
• https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/11/19/1

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