CVE-2012-3440

medium

Published 2012-08-08 · Modified 2026-04-29

💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

5.6

Description

A certain Red Hat script for sudo 1.7.2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on the /var/tmp/nsswitch.conf.bak temporary file.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

Red Hat Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
5	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`0`
sid	Fixed	`0`
forky	Fixed	`0`
bullseye	Fixed	`0`
bookworm	Fixed	`0`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
todd_miller	sudo	`1.7.2`

References

CWEs

CWE-59

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.