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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.7

CVE-2016-8641 json

A privilege escalation vulnerability was found in nagios 4.2.x that occurs in daemon-init.in when creating necessary files and insecurely c…

published 2018-08-01 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-9482

cvss
6.7
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.1%
EPSS 1.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 66%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • icinga Manager Client Tools 12, Enterprise Storage 4 1.13.3-12.3.1
  • nagios SLES for SAP 11 SP4, SLES 11 SP4, SLE Software Development Kit 11 SP4 3.0.6-1.25.36.3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:3620-1SUSE-SU-2018:3240-1

  • nagios openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.4.6-2.5

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11073-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-8641 updated cvss 6.7

nagios: Unsafe ownership change leading to privilege escalation

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 (Icehouse) nagios Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 (Juno) nagios Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (Kilo) nagios, nagios-common Red Hat Storage 3 nagios, nagios-common
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Mobile Application Platform 4 nagios
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Timeline

  1. First public exploit (EDB-40774)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

1.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 66% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-40774 Nagios 4.2.2 - Local Privilege Escalation local, 2016-11-18

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 6.7 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.0 7.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.2 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Affected products

  • Nagios Enterprises nagios

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.