CVE-2016-8641
A privilege escalation vulnerability was found in nagios 4.2.x that occurs in daemon-init.in when creating necessary files and insecurely changing the ownership afterwards.
Does this matter?
A public exploit is published in Exploit-DB (verified) and the impact is high, while EPSS rates exploitation at 1.1%. Anyone can run this; patch or mitigate before the next change window and check exposed instances for signs of use.
Description
A privilege escalation vulnerability was found in nagios 4.2.x that occurs in daemon-init.in when creating necessary files and insecurely changing the ownership afterwards. It's possible for the local attacker to create symbolic links before the files are to be created and possibly escalating the privileges with the ownership change.
- CVSS 3.0
- 7.8 HIGHCVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- EPSS
- 1.14% probability · 66th percentile
- Public exploits
- 1 in Exploit-DB · verified · first 18 November 2016
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-59
- Affected
- nagios/nagios
- Source
- secalert@redhat.com
EPSS 1.1% since 27 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.
Public exploits (1)
Entries in Exploit-DB that cite this CVE. Links go to the Exploit-DB page and to the file in the public repository; nothing is hosted here. A verified tick means the Exploit-DB team confirmed the exploit works against the stated version.
References
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/95121Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-8641Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory
- https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nagioscore/commit/f2ed227673d3b2da643eb5cad26b2d87674f28c1.patchPatch, Third Party Advisory
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201702-26Third Party Advisory
- https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/40774/Exploit, Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/95121Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2016-8641Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory
- https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nagioscore/commit/f2ed227673d3b2da643eb5cad26b2d87674f28c1.patchPatch, Third Party Advisory
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201702-26Third Party Advisory
- https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/40774/Exploit, Third Party Advisory, VDB Entry
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.