Two high-severity vulnerabilities that can be exploited for privilege escalation have been patched in a McAfee enterprise product component.
The vulnerabilities have been found to impact versions prior to 5.7.5 of McAfee Agent, the ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) component that downloads and enforces policies, and executes client-side tasks, such as deployment and updating. The agent also installs and updates endpoint products.
One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-0166, was discovered by Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University. CERT/CC on Thursday published an advisory describing the researcher’s findings.
Dormann discovered that an OpenSSL component leveraged by McAfee Agent uses a variable that specifies a location where unprivileged Windows users can place arbitrary files. An attacker who can plant a specially crafted file can achieve arbitrary code execution with SYSTEM privileges.
The second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-31854, can be exploited by a local user to inject arbitrary shell code into a file. An attacker can exploit the security hole to obtain a reverse shell that allows them to gain root privileges.
This issue was discovered by Russell Wells from Cyberlinx Security, who has told SecurityWeek that he will publish a blog post describing his findings in the upcoming period.
Wells said exploitation requires access to the McAfee ePO host — not the application itself, but the underlying Windows host.
Both vulnerabilities have been assigned “high severity” ratings and they have been patched with the release of McAfee Agent 5.7.5. McAfee has advised customers to install the update.
McAfee Enterprise last year merged with FireEye after both were acquired by private equity giant STG. This week, STG announced the launch of Trellix, an extended detection and response (XDR) firm created following the merger.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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